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The end of everything.

While the rest of you were watch­ing the for­mer mayor of New York, squir­ing his third wife, mock­ing the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­nee for pres­i­dent as “cos­mopoli­tan,” Detroi­ters were wait­ing to see if their mayor was going to jail now or later. Kwame Kilpatrick’s plea deal, being crafted in the wake of a quasi-impeachment hear­ing yes­ter­day, was on, then off, then on, and then it rained and every­body went home. Today it’s most likely on; no one expects K2 to be mayor at the end of the day. Every pic­ture of him taken recently shows him in another of his fine suits, steepling his hands against his mouth and scowling.

The stick­ing point is jail time. He’s fac­ing 10 felony counts, and the pros­e­cu­tor wants him to do at least a few months behind bars. The peo­ple of Detroit, mean­while, prove emi­nently quotable: “The mayor shouldn’t go out like a punk.” “He’s an empty suit and the next suit he’s going to wear is a pin­stripe suit.” “The man spent his whole life try­ing to be famous. Now the best he can do is be infa­mous.” (May I just say? It’s nice to see the owner of a bar­ber shop knows the dif­fer­ence between fame and infamy. Gives me hope for the language.)

UPDATE: That’s all, folks.

Mean­while, Peggy Noo­nan got caught telling the truth — see approx­i­mately nine mil­lion other sites for audio and tran­scripts, or click the fol­low­ing link — but Scott Rosen­berg brings up the greater point: Where was all this hon­esty in Noonan’s column?

Now, if Peggy Noo­nan wrote a col­umn every week that was as hon­est with her read­ers as she is here, with her col­leagues, when she thinks the micro­phone is off, I would read it reli­giously. She’s part of a world that I don’t inhabit. But now I have a bright pic­ture of the fact that she’s not writ­ing what she knows and believes.

Exactly right. Exactly. And if there’s one thing that makes read­ing the best blogs so refresh­ing and read­ing most news­pa­per com­men­tary a lit­tle like being stuck in an air­less room, it’s this. Of course Noo­nan is a GOP oper­a­tive with a high-paid sinecure on a right-wing edi­to­r­ial page, and she’s expected to rep­re­sent for their side. She’s a colum­nist now, but could be a speech­writer in a Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion by this time next year. Nev­er­the­less, it’s true: Too many writ­ers sim­ply aren’t hon­est with their read­ers, and even if you can’t put your fin­ger on it pre­cisely, it’s obvi­ous when it’s hap­pen­ing. It’s why Mitch Albom is so grat­ing, a guy who made mil­lions writ­ing a book advis­ing oth­ers to slow down, savor, smell the roses — and uses it to cat­a­pult him­self into a stratos­phere of hyper­ac­tive multi-platform media personality-fying that ensures all of his work gets half his atten­tion. Peo­ple know he’s a fraud, even if they can’t quite say why.

The rea­son so many peo­ple writ­ing for news­pa­pers hedge and qual­ify and cavil is, they have more to lose. Jim Har­ri­son uses a line every so often, some­thing about con­se­crat­ing every day and writ­ing like your hair’s on fire. That’s it.

Blog­gage: Mov­ing van arrives at Detroit’s may­oral man­sion, then leaves. If it’s someone’s idea of a joke, it’s a pretty good one.

Many are writ­ing about Sarah Palin’s speech last night, but Roy’s one-liner won’t be beaten: Gov­er­nor Palin’s address tonight was basi­cally Reba McEn­tire doing a one-woman show on the life of Phyl­lis Schlafly.

Finally, any­one want to babysit Fri­day night? Alan and I are going to see the Dirtbombs:

(Hell, maybe she’s old enough to come along, too.)

Posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 9:12 am
in Current events, Detroit life.

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124 responses to
“The end of everything.”

  1. alex said on September 4th, 2008 at 10:22 am

    Lip­stick on a pit bull indeed. Glad to see pigs are finally get­ting some respect for their intelligence.

  2. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 10:46 am

    I can babysit. I need the money. I just paid for col­lege books for my older son.

    Roy got it exactly right. Per­fect. I want to see how she does when she’s unscripted. The mayor or Ketchikan was on NPR this morn­ing say­ing Ms Palin cam­paigned in his town on promis­ing the bridge to nowhere, then after being elected, can­celled the project with a memo. She kept the 233 mil­lion for the state, though.

  3. brian stouder said on September 4th, 2008 at 11:38 am

    Hey, I’ll under­bid Mary; the young folks and I are on our own on Fri­day, since Pam is run­ning off to Ship­she­wana for a scrap­book­ing thing (or else a tryst with some bearded fel­low with a name like Amos or Solomon, and nails in his pocket) -
    and we’d babysit for free, although I make no promises about how much of your Diet Coke (or what­ever) will be left.

    Actu­ally, I bet you’d draw a frown from the young’n for using the term “babysit” with regard to her. It raises a ques­tion that Pam and I have dis­cussed, regard­ing what age is old enough to begin leav­ing the young folks on their own for some period of time.

  4. Julie Robinson said on September 4th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    LA Mary, wel­come to Fleece U!! Just wait until he tries to sell those books back. Our son is study­ing voice and luck­ily he mostly has bought actual books of music, which he can use for many years. Same thing with the tux. But this semes­ter he took a big hit, about $450, plus his sheet music, plus $300 for the accom­pa­nist at voice lessons. And of course tuition went up too. Soon no one will be able to afford col­lege. I’m hop­ing Barack can fix that one too.

  5. Connie said on September 4th, 2008 at 12:36 pm

    Back in the day I spent two years as the buyer’s assis­tant in charge of buy­ing and sell­ing used books at the MSU Book­store. Most stores still use the same pol­icy: if the book is adopted for a class in the next semes­ter we buy it for 50% of the retail price, and sell it for 75%. If it is not being used in the next semes­ter we will offer what­ever is the going rate from one of the whole­sale buy­ers, in MSU’s case it was the Nebraska Book Com­pany. So some­times it is worth wait­ing a semes­ter before sell­ing your book.

    You may remem­ber this pic­ture from your own col­lege days: remem­ber the per­son who looked at your pile, quoted you a total, and then fanned a giant wad of dol­lar bills and handed you the right amount. I was really impressed the first cou­ple of times I saw that, but quickly learned how easy and sim­ple it really was.

    My daughter’s books were close to $1,000 the first semes­ter of her fresh­man year. At least the big sci­ence text­books got used again her sopho­more year. This semes­ter she has three sci­ence classes, with labs, includ­ing organic chem, and I wouldn’t be sur­prised if she had to spend close to $1,000 again.

  6. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 12:40 pm

    We just fin­ished rewatch­ing Palin’s speech this morn­ing. Very good marks all around. It really aston­ishes me that folks around here are so crit­i­cal of her fam­ily and her polit­i­cal service.

    I mean, first we had to lis­ten to a bunch of you carp­ing about her decid­ing to have her baby boy with Downs syn­drome. Some of you even repeated rumors that it was her 17-year old daughter’s baby. Then you latched onto the vis­cous crap that was being said about her daughter’s actual preg­nancy and this became a cue for you to mis­guid­edly crit­i­cize absti­nence edu­ca­tion. Which then Jeff had to set you straight on, though you would have none of it

    What is it with some of you peo­ple? Is a per­son only wor­thy of your respect if they embrace killing babies for what­ever rea­son of con­ve­nience? Tragic.

    Now, the lat­est is to crit­i­cize Palin’s expe­ri­ence. You’re grasp­ing at straws and try­ing to second-guess what the true story will be once the can­di­date is vet­ted by the press. Obama’s expe­ri­ence isn’t exactly impres­sive. You’re being dis­hon­est with your­self to see it any other way.

  7. beb said on September 4th, 2008 at 12:52 pm

    The mayor cost the city $8 millino in a wrong­ful fir­ing case and is being asked to repay a whole one mil­lion. That in itself is enough to stick in my craw! 120 days in jail? It ought to be a year. At least he took a five year pro­hi­bi­tion on run­ning for pub­lic office. That ought to be life­time but if mar­ion barry can go to prison for drugs, come back and get re-elected Mayor of Wash­ing­ton, DC, then I guess Kwane can too.

    Col­lege looms a few years away for our daugh­ter. Maybe by then books will be a thing of the past, replaced with on-line edi­tions or books on CDs. Print on demand could pro­duce books for a lot less then what pub­lish­ers are charg­ing today but $5 a copy roy­al­ties don’t pay the bills. (Assum­ing one spends a year research­ing a text books and has a medium income for $50,000 per year. One would need to sell 10,000 copies to cover one’s liv­ing expenses. Text bookds don’t sell in that number.)

  8. Mindy said on September 4th, 2008 at 12:56 pm

    Wow, four months in jail for the mayor. I won­der if the suits in the joint with be the clas­sic black and white stripes.

  9. Jolene said on September 4th, 2008 at 1:04 pm

    Danny, peo­ple have crit­i­cized Palin for a num­ber of things related to her views and expe­ri­ence, but I don’t recall that any­one said any­thing neg­a­tive about her deci­sion to carry Trig to term.

    What’s inter­est­ing is that both she and her daugh­ter are being con­grat­u­lated for their deci­sions when, if McCain-Palin poli­cies were imple­mented, there’d be no deci­sions to be made w/ respect to con­tin­u­ing a preg­nancy with­out risk­ing prosecution.

  10. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 1:05 pm

    Vis­cous crap sounds par­tic­u­lary nasty.

    I didn’t crit­i­cize any­one for hav­ing a down syn­drome baby. I won­dered why a mother would be tested for down syn­drome if there was no con­sid­er­a­tion of options. I didn’t attack anyone’s fam­ily. I will say absti­nence edu­ca­tion sounds like a very bad idea, and I’d say Bris­tol is an exam­ple of why it is a bad idea. Teenagers have sex. Telling them not to does not work. Telling them to be respon­si­ble and to take pre­cau­tions if they do have sex seems to be a lot more effec­tive. Edu­cat­ing kids about options does not send them out into the street in a frenzy of promiscuity.

  11. ellen said on September 4th, 2008 at 1:08 pm

    Danny — who is the “you” that you are talk­ing about? I don’t recall Nancy or any of the reg­u­lar com­menters on this board say­ing any­thing deroga­tory about Gov. Palin’s deci­sion to have a baby with Downs Syn­drome. Maybe there were some trolls/lurkers in the later com­ments that I missed, but I am pretty sure that even Cal­iban wouldn’t go there with the hyper­bole. And yeah, I will agree with you that she has some awe­some speech­writ­ers, and her pageant train­ing really showed in the deliv­ery. And that 7-year-old… so cute!

  12. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 1:09 pm

    Mary, I agree with you and what Jeff said. Absti­nence only is a loser. But absti­nence needs to be a big part of sex edu­ca­tion for teens. Oth­er­wise it is tacit approval of promiscuity.

    EDIT: And by absti­nence, I’m also talk­ing about the sorts of edu­ca­tional schemes that get the teens think­ing of the true respon­si­bil­ity of a baby (like car­ry­ing around a doll for a week, etc.)

  13. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 1:11 pm

    And that 7-year-old… so cute!

    I know. She reminds us of our next door neighbor’s youngest daugh­ter. She must have her par­ents wrapped around her pudgy lit­tle fin­gers. How could any­one pos­si­bly say “no” to that child.

  14. Gasman said on September 4th, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    Danny,
    You really do astound me. Does it not strike you as some­what ironic that the very scion of “Asb­sti­nence Only” edu­ca­tion has a 17 year daugh­ter who got preg­nant? What did we hear from the uber­moral­ist right? They gushed about how adult Bris­tol Palin was and Palin said that she was look­ing for­ward to being a grand­mother. We and/or the lib­eral media didn’t make that one up. Does it also not strike you as ironic that Palin fiercely defends her fam­ily and crit­i­cizes the press for even bring­ing up the story, but Palin then flies in the sire of Bristol’s baby to use the blessed cou­ple as stage props? If she really wanted to defend her fam­ily, she’d keep them out of the lime­light. I have not seen any­one in print that crit­i­cized Bris­tol or her mom for not hav­ing an abor­tion. That is a fic­tional cre­ation of the right wing.

    Should we not scru­ti­nize Palin’s record as Gov. of Alaska and Mayor of Wasilla? Is it insignif­i­cant that when she took office in Wasilla the bud­get was bal­anced and she left it $22 mil­lion in deficit? Not exactly the model of fis­cal respon­si­bil­ity. But you don’t want to hear that.

    Is it insignif­i­cant that she lob­bied for — and received — some of the biggest ear­marks that were crit­i­cized by McCain as waste­ful exam­ples of gov­ern­ment pork? Of all the hogs in the trough, none had his/her snout any deeper than Gov. Palin. She was one of the biggest cheer­lead­ers for the Bridge to Nowhere. McCain crit­i­cized the bridge, why do you now ignore her ini­tial sup­port? I guess it is more con­ve­nient to do so.

    Is it insignif­i­cant that both she and her pas­tor make fright­en­ing state­ments about war in Iraq as being a holy Chris­t­ian cru­sade? As I recall, you were more than eager to have Obama held respon­si­ble for the words of his pas­tor. Why should she not be held to the same stan­dard that you held Obama to?

    There is also the trou­bling notion of the ethics inves­ti­ga­tion con­cern­ing her actions as gov­er­nor. Once again, these alle­ga­tions were not con­cocted by the press or her lib­eral foes, they arose from her offi­cial conduct.

    But you would blithely ignore all of the above. Why?

    Does it not strike you as hyp­o­crit­i­cal that her record, which by pres­i­den­tial stan­dards is mea­ger at best, is being inflated to ridicu­lous proportions?

    Danny, if you find Obama’s record unim­pres­sive, what about Palin is so impres­sive? She has been out of the coun­try once in her life, and yet is touted a being capa­ble in for­eign pol­icy. How does that work? Some R talk­ing heads have even sug­gested that her record eclipses that of Joe Biden. That one needs quite a bit of expla­na­tion as well. Yes, she has com­manded that mighty army that is the Alaskan National Guard, 4000 strong, but has she even issued a sin­gle order? If so, what?

    Palin is a absolute light weight whose choice is indica­tive of the extent that for­mer “mav­er­ick” John McCain has become sub­servient to the evan­gel­i­cal base of the Repub­li­can Party. It also calls into ques­tion his lack of judge­ment in choos­ing some­one so unfit to be com­man­der in chief. His con­cern for national secu­rity doesn’t run very deep or he would have cho­sen some­body, any­body, who has more of a record to look to.

    If you have any infor­ma­tion that would rebut the fac­tual record con­cern­ing Palin’s tenure as mayor and gov­er­nor, please feel free to share that with us. I sus­pect, how­ever, that you will resort to your usual invec­tive and ad hominem attacks and totally ignore Palin’s record. Face it Danny, you are a right wing cheer­leader and won’t let a few good facts get in your way.

    You fairly embody the immor­tal words of Earl Land­grebe: “Don’t con­fuse me with facts. I’ve made up my mind.”

  15. Scout said on September 4th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

    From my per­spec­tive, Palin did what she was tapped to do and that is fire up the Evan­gel­i­cal Base. They were hop­ing she’d also drag a few Hillary hold­outs to their side but I doubt that was accom­plished with that smug, con­de­scend­ing, sar­cas­tic speech that did noth­ing to intro­duce who she is and what her party stands for. She spent the entire time play­ing the role of one of the Heathers, mock­ing Obama and all that he stands for. She went after com­mu­nity orga­niz­ers (so did Rudy) and she told a myr­iad of out­right lies.

    Every­one expected her to be able to pull off a teleprompter speech, and she did. What is not being said is how her speech­writ­ers com­pletely failed to artic­u­late any vision for this coun­try, any relief for the real pain peo­ple are in. At least AP had the decency to pub­lish a list of the incon­sis­tan­cies. http://​news​.yahoo​.com/​s​/​a​p​/​2​0​0​8​0​9​0​4​/​a​p​_​o​n​_​e​l​_​p​r​/​c​v​n​_​f​a​c​t​_check

    The unin­tended con­se­quence of the Cari­bou Bar­bie VP nom (hat tip to Mal­loy) was to fire up the Demo­c­ra­tic base… you know, com­mu­nity organizers.

  16. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 1:41 pm

    Gas­man, what do you think of OJ Simp­son? You remind me of some­one else who used to fre­quent this blog.

    Any­way, as to invec­tive, you really are a hyp­ocrite. Wasn’t it you talk­ing about piss­ing on graves a few days ago? Right.

    Regard­ing Palin’s record, I think she said it best:

    I was mayor of my home­town. And since our oppo­nents in this pres­i­den­tial elec­tion seem to look down on that expe­ri­ence, let me explain to them what the job involved. I guess — I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a com­mu­nity orga­nizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.

  17. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 1:50 pm

    Com­mu­nity orga­niz­ers have respon­si­bil­i­ties too. They just don’t get paid as much, if anything.

  18. coozledad said on September 4th, 2008 at 1:51 pm

    Attack. Move the goal­posts. Attack. Move the goal­posts.
    Con­sider what would hap­pen if a Left-wing Radio host referred to a Repub­li­can Women’s aux­il­lary as a Pack of Repub­li­can Whores. Well, the Repub­li­can mouth­pieces are really stok­ing the shit:
    http://​media​mat​ters​.org/​i​t​e​m​s​/​2​0​0​8​0​9​040008
    You see, it’s alright with Danny when his limp-dicked avatars of spew go after us, but panic starts to set in when the tables turn, and some seces­sion­ist is caught dead to rights piss­ing on the flag.
    Alaska is not first by any met­ric. It’s 49th at best. And yes, her fam­ily is no dif­fer­ent from mine, but my fam­ily could use a lit­tle jail time.
    She and her old man are a pair of Aaron Burrs, ded­i­cated only to their per­sonal enrich­ment. Every­thing they do says God Damn Amer­ica, day in day out. Fuck them and their shabby last-minute pre­tense of patri­o­tism. Fuck Repub­li­cans, and fuck their pussy-ass whin­ing.
    Stand up and take it, for once, you blowhards.

  19. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    OMG, you must be kid­ding, cooz. I mean, the con­ser­v­a­tives on this blog are few and far between. And we do stand up and take it and largely take the high road.

    Con­versely, the over­wh­lem­ing major­ity of lib­er­als here are con­stantly whin­ing and cir­cling the wag­ons. And using base invec­tive. And speak­ing of tak­ing it, some have even left here because they could not han­dle any­thing unless it was a con­stant cacoph­ony of left-wing cheer lead­ing agreement.

    Too bad…

  20. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    Who left?
    I know I fade in and out, mostly due to work load.
    Here’s some­thing I will whine about. What was up with the speak­ers last night refer­ring to replac­ing the lib­er­als in Wash­ing­ton? Last time I checked, Bush and Cheney were still the folks McCain and Palin were look­ing to replace. All the piss­ing and moan­ing about big gov­ern­ment in the last eight years yadda yadda. It’s BUSH you guys are run­ning against.

  21. nancy said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    While I hope we can keep things civil with Danny/Jeff, I think C’dad nails it with his sum­ma­tion: “Attack. Move the goal­posts. Attack. Move the goal­posts.” That’s it, and that’s why I lost my tem­per this week, in a nutshell.

    Noth­ing con­vinces me that the GOP stands for noth­ing more than win­ning elec­tions, cement­ing power and loot­ing the fed­eral trea­sury more than their reac­tion to Sarah Palin. I had no par­tic­u­lar ani­mos­ity toward her until last night, but when I hear Repub­li­cans try to say with a straight face that it’s “sex­ist” to attack her for A, B or C, the hair on my head threat­ens to catch fire.

    After 20-some years of culture-warring, we’re sup­posed to stand by, applaud that she chose to con­tinue a special-needs preg­nancy and went back to work THREE DAYS AFTER THE BIRTH and pre­tend that they haven’t been call­ing women who went back to work three months hav­ing a healthy baby bad moth­ers? After years of hear­ing Repub­li­cans say that birth-control infor­ma­tion will cause teenagers to turn into rut­ting beasts, that absti­nence is what works, and here she is with her preg­nant 17-year-old daugh­ter and her future son-in-law, all of 18, and we just, what? Smile and say “that’s nice?” We’re not sup­posed to notice that the daugh­ter of a high-school sci­ence teacher thinks intel­li­gent design should be taught in pub­lic schools?

    (And why do I get the idea young Levi John­ston didn’t know he was get­ting mar­ried until Mon­day morn­ing? Just a hunch.)

    And that’s just her per­sonal life. They spend months call­ing Obama a cal­low, inex­pe­ri­enced, vapid twit and then deliver the “com­manded the Alaska National Guard” and “15 miles across the Bering Strait” lines, and what, exactly, is an intel­li­gent per­son to do besides spit cof­fee all over the mon­i­tor? Will Palin be made avail­able for media inter­views? Is she ever going to answer some of the very legit­i­mate ques­tions that have been raised in the last week? Or are we just going to let the amen cor­ner take it from here?

  22. coozledad said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:16 pm

    Still whin­ing. Or is it whing­ing?
    Too bad some­one had to leave here and go flip on one of the hun­dreds of media out­lets that carry noth­ing but Repub­li­can party sanc­tioned shit. I grieve for them.

  23. Gasman said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:19 pm

    Danny,
    Yet again you assid­u­ously avoided any of the spe­cific crit­i­cisms which I lev­eled at Palin. She’s fis­cally irre­spon­si­ble, she’s a bully, and she is a major league flip-flopper. As to piss­ing on graves, I stand by my list: Jesse Helms and Dick Cheney. You want to defend their virtue and honor go right ahead, I’m sure it would be amus­ing. Point of fact, say­ing that I intensely dis­like some­one is not the same as resort­ing to only invec­tive and ad hominem. I’ve been volu­mi­nous in cit­ing my rea­sons for my loathing for the two men. You resort to reflex­ive unthink­ing cheap shots that sound just like right wing radio and TV; lots of name call­ing but curi­ously devoid of any rea­son­ing. Just once I’d like a con­ser­v­a­tive to give me a com­pelling rea­son to vote Repub­li­can besides just scream­ing “lib­er­als suck.”

  24. nancy said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:22 pm

    Oh, and just to add: Don’t EVEN try to tell me that if the Oba­mas’ daugh­ters were older, and one of them was preg­nant at 17, by a boy who described him­self on his MySpace page as, say, a “fuckin’ playa,” that the usual sus­pects wouldn’t have to be car­ried off on stretch­ers. I mean, don’t even.

  25. Joe Kobiela said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:22 pm

    Coo­zledad,
    You sound like a typ­i­cal demo­c­rat, you don’t get your way you yell and scream and curse, shows you have a small vocab­u­lary.
    Danny stick to your guns, I like Palin,thought maybe the now gang might at least back her on being a work­ing mom but I guess it is ok only if you are a Dem. Amaz­ing how scared the left is over this lady. If she is so terrible,why would you want to get her off the ticket? afraid the silent major­ity might get her elected? It just really grates on the dem’s when they can’t fig­ure out why us low class, silent, une­d­u­cated masses, won’t believe like they do.
    Joe

  26. brian stouder said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

    Scared???! Scared of the lip-sticked bull dog??

    Palin ain’t no Pale Rider; the more I learn of her, the less I see.

    Just for one thing -

    Palin Slashed Fund­ing To Help Teenage Moth­ers. Ear­lier this year, Palin used a line-item veto “to slash fund­ing for a state pro­gram ben­e­fit­ing teen moth­ers in need of a place to live.” Fund­ing for Covenant House Alaska, which pro­vides tran­si­tional hous­ing for teen moth­ers, was cut by 20 per­cent — from $5 mil­lion to $3.9 mil­lion. [Wash­ing­ton Post, 9/3/08]

    Given that “ear­lier this year” her own daugh­ter might have become a “teen in need of a place to live”, Palin sounds craven, to me

  27. coozledad said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:35 pm

    Vocab­u­lary isn’t the issue here, it’s capac­ity for empa­thy. In some birth trau­mas or skat­ing injuries, or in some fam­i­lies that are cur­rently run­ning this coun­try into the ground, the empathic response has been all but oblit­er­ated. It is as though there is a bar­rier sep­a­rat­ing the rep­til­ian brain from the more highly devel­oped frontal cor­tex. Per­haps sci­ence will solve this mys­tery regard­ing the lump of foul jello that passes for a Repub­li­can brain, and hope­fully it will hap­pen before the Repub­li­cans kill all the fund­ing for science.

  28. jcburns said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:37 pm

    There seems to be some dis­con­nect when I (or oth­ers) bring up ‘hypocrisy.’ It’s a fancy word. My spell-check has to fre­quently cor­rect me on the spelling. But what it means is dead sim­ple:
    If you say that it’s wrong when per­son A (from a party other than yours) does some­thing, then if per­son B (who you like) does the same thing and you say “oh, that’s fine, that’s admirable,” then it’s clear that you don’t believe in apply­ing the same stan­dard to everyone’s actions.

    So. Library cen­sor­ship. Sup­port­ing those who desire to secede from the US. Claim­ing the reformer title and tak­ing pork money. Work­ing moth­ers: threat or men­ace? Claim­ing com­mu­nity orga­niz­ers are responsibility-free. Claim­ing that man­tle of reform while run­ning your tiny town into deficit spend­ing. Talk a few envi­ron­men­tal buzz­words while advo­cat­ing an energy pol­icy that basi­cally says “we’ve got a big ol state up here…open ‘er up, take all you want.”

    And, oh yeah, the very Repub­li­cans who make snide remarks about ‘Obama the Celebrity’ are treat­ing their VP nominee…how?

  29. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:37 pm

    Silent major­ity? You guys have been in power for eight years, twenty out of the last twenty eight years. I remem­ber when you weren’t. The econ­omy was in good shape.

  30. derwood said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:39 pm

    She sounds nuts to me.

    Danny, you posted 3 sen­tences that summed up her record for you…all they said was that she had respon­si­bil­i­ties and implied that com­mu­nity orga­niz­ers do not. How do those 3 sen­tences explain her record? All of us have responsibilities…no mat­ter what our job or place in this world we have respon­si­bil­i­ties. I’m just smart enough to know that get­ting through my six sigma project does not make me qual­i­fied to be Vice President.

    d

  31. jcburns said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:41 pm

    Joe, okay, I’ll ask: why won’t you believe as we do? (I’ll leave out your class slurs…you prob­a­bly have more edu­ca­tion than I do.)

    You’re right. I can’t fig­ure it out. It grates on me.

    Is it just that you’ve been taught “any­thing from the left: go the oppo­site way, just to piss them off?”

    Do you feel good doing that?

  32. Scout said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    Joe, free­dom lov­ing peo­ple every­where are scared of this snarky, sar­cas­tic and inex­pe­ri­enced Heather being one step from the most pow­er­ful posi­tion in the world. Not just lib­er­als. Grow up and tell us what qual­i­fies her instead of men­da­cious name call­ing, mis­rep­re­sent­ing the val­ues and inten­tions of peo­ple who dis­agree with you. Nobody here who is cheer­lead­ing for Palin has come up with any­thing pos­i­tive to say about her pol­icy plat­form, all they’ve added is defen­sive non issue clap trap about Palin’s fam­ily woes. Which, by the way, the McCain team is the one exploit­ing the hell out of that mess. Maybe they don’t want to talk about ISSUES either.

  33. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 2:54 pm

    jc, it was her first speech. Obama has given dozens over a mul­ti­year period and still we are mostly hear­ing bro­mides and unde­fined calls for hope and change that are cheered and cheered by syco­pant masses. Some have even fainted at his speeches (regard­less of the fact that there is very lit­tle substance).

    I’d say that the Repub­li­cans have a ways to go with their exu­ber­ance before it reaches those ridicu­lous heights.

    EDIT: And BTW, Scout. VP’s are the attack dogs, nor­mally. Right? So a lit­tle snark and sar­casm are per­mis­si­ble, espe­cially at the con­ven­tion. Or was the D con­ven­tion all for of nice-talk? Right.

  34. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

    So I should like her because she’s a work­ing mom and Democ­rats are too exu­ber­ant. Any­thing else?
    I don’t think that was her first speech. She’s a highly expe­ri­enced leader, isn’t she? She has exec­u­tive expe­ri­ence, unlike Obama or Biden. Biden doesn’ t have any because he’s a sen­a­tor, just like McCain. Who was a con­gress­man before that…
    I heard a tape of her inau­gural speech as gov­er­nor. It was very dif­fer­ent from last night’s. Lots and lots of reli­gious ref­er­ences, which were com­pletely absent last night. Also miss­ing from every speech I heard last night was the word con­sti­tu­tion. Lots of fight­ing and suf­fer­ing and evil ref­er­ences, no constitution.

  35. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

    Um, der­wood. So what is Obama’s record? Vot­ing “present” nume­ri­ous times at the state assem­bly level and US Sen­ate level? Writ­ing two per­sonal mem­oirs but not author­ing any leg­is­la­tion? Run­ning for pres­i­dent for what seems and inter­minable amount of time? And he is at the front of the Demo­c­ra­tic ticket, may I remind you. Not VP pick.

  36. jcburns said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:04 pm

    Danny, if I send you the tran­script of Obama’s accep­tance speech…just black and white text in Courier 12, will you point out the unde­fined calls for hope and change?

    I mean it was LOADED with specifics. So much so that Jon Stew­art poked fun at all the “I will do this” and “I will do that” con­struc­tions in a row – but boy, they were there. Cut taxes for these peo­ple in this way, offer tax breaks to these star­tups, become inde­pen­dent of Mideast oil by this year…really, it’s all there in black and white.

    It was also loaded with (to my ear quite sin­cere) attempts to reach across the aisle and do all of this in a new way.

    So, do me a favor. Read it!

    I’ve read every word of Palin’s speech in black and white, and will do the same with McCain. Not see­ing what I saw in Obama’s speech…and def­i­nitely not see­ing the respect that Obama AND Biden offered McCain in their speeches.

    (Edit: and now the “just authored two mem­oirs” thing is being tossed out there like he dic­tated them over a week­end. “The Audac­ity of Hope” is one mag­nif­i­cent piece of writing…enough to count as a life’s work for any num­ber of more hack authors. Thought­ful. Intel­li­gent. It’s at your library. It’s worth your time. How dare they triv­i­al­ize that achievement.)

  37. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:05 pm

    Mary, I meant her first speech at the national level.

  38. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:07 pm

    Yes, John. I will. You know the address, no doubt.

  39. brian stouder said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:18 pm

    Some have even fainted at his speeches (regard­less of the fact that there is very lit­tle substance).

    Another red her­ring! I think Danny has a fish farm out there in Cal­i­forny! Sean Han­nity — who duti­fully apes Uncle Rush’s “mes­siah” chant — almost never fails to men­tions peo­ple faint­ing at Obama events.

    But — I per­son­ally attended an event in Fort Wayne which fea­tured Pres­i­dent Clin­ton last spring, and two peo­ple keeled over (one swooner was just three or four feet from me)

    See, if you go to one of these big cam­paign events, and if you’re a UIP (Un Impor­tant Per­son) like me, what hap­pens is you stand and stand and stand and stand; and you get crowded, and peo­ple get in your space, and you shuf­fle a lit­tle and then stand some more (from the time I got out of the car to the time I returned was about 4 hours).

    The woman I saw swoon was prob­a­bly about 70 years old.

    By way of say­ing, the D pri­mary race had all the pizazz, and drew all the crowds, and some folks (at sev­eral dif­fer­ent can­di­dates’ events) over-exerted themselves.

    I think GOP apol­o­gists, look­ing at the fune­real McCain events, devel­oped pizazz envy.…but maybe Ms Palin will cure that (so to speak)

  40. Jolene said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:22 pm

    Danny, Obama has given a lot of speeches in large crowds in the hot sun. I think you’ll find that that would account for any faint­ing that’s occurred. On the issue of bro­mides, if you’re not sat­is­fied with his speeches, go to his web­site and look at any of the many posi­tion papers posted there. (I’ve heard that there’s a place online where you can cal­cu­late how his tax plan would affect you, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe some­body else can help?) You’ll find one on almost any sub­ject you can imag­ine and, by the way, com­pare what’s on offer to what’s avail­able on the McCain site. If any­body is offer­ing bro­mides, it’s him.

  41. moe99 said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

    With respect to Palin’s exec­u­tive expe­ri­ence as mayor of Wasilla. Wasilla has a city man­ager who runs the city day to day. From what I under­stand the mayor is lit­tle more than a fig­ure­head. Hope the MSM media fig­ures that out. Could be yet another con­tra­dic­tion to add to the mass we have already.

    Apolo­gies to Gas­man on the prior thread. I just saw your post on this. Funny Danny didn’t see it and went off on her exec­u­tive expe­ri­ence as mayor. He needs to read up a bit more on the facts on the ground.….

  42. nancy said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:31 pm

    Ding ding ding! And Brian wins the thread with “pizazz envy!”

  43. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:32 pm

    I had to stand out in our park­ing lot today for 50 min­utes wait­ing for Ahnuld to show up (they wanted a lot of employ­ees in the back­ground) and I nearly swooned. It’s very hot out there. I bailed out before his speech, but that was ok. The press guy wanted as many uni­formed employ­ees as pos­si­ble and I’m wear­ing my jacket that inspires vio­lence in pysch patients. A few of the non patient care type man­agers changed into scrubs to be in the photos.

  44. Jolene said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

    Re the two mem­oirs issue: Only one of Obama’s books is a mem­oir. That one, Dreams of My Father, was writ­ten years ago just after he left law school and describes his quest for iden­tity given his unusual back­ground. The sec­ond, Audac­ity of Hope, is a policy-oriented book sim­i­lar to those that many politi­cians write as they pre­pare to run for high office. One dif­fer­ence: Obama wrote his cam­paign book him­self rather than work­ing with a ghost­writer, as McCain has done in pro­duc­ing his sev­eral memoirs.

  45. Joe Kobiela said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:36 pm

    Let’s see, Obama has a cam­paign man­ager who runs his day to day affairs, yet he claims, he runs his own cam­paign, man­ag­ing peo­ple and money. Is that the same??
    Joe

  46. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:41 pm

    [runs in, out of breath]

    Sub­ject change to post topic at top — com­men­tary in news­pa­pers com­pared to “air­less room,”  — too true. Which makes read­ing blog­ging inputs like a con­ver­sa­tion on a windy clifftop — “Heeeeaaaaaaath­cliffe! Heeeeaaaaaattthhhcliffe!”

    It’s a good day, utterly inde­pen­dent of polit­i­cal any­thing, except that i’m a Repub­li­can doing {rim shot} com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing! With Dems and GOP­ers! God is an iron!*

    [runs out, waving]

    *Spi­der Robin­son ref­er­ence; look it up, it actu­ally makes sense when you think about it.

  47. Scout said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

    The crick­ets chirp as I wait for some­one to tell me what Sarah’s qual­i­fi­ca­tions to hold the high­est office in the land are. The come­back “Oh yeah? Well OBAMA.… blah blah blah.” is not cut­ting it.

  48. Jolene said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:48 pm

    Joe, like the CEOs other large orga­ni­za­tions, Obama selected a senior staff, with whom he appears to com­mu­ni­cate daily or sev­eral times a day, and, pre­sum­ably, they appointed and super­vise oth­ers. It’s called del­e­ga­tion of author­ity and occurs in any orga­ni­za­tion larger than a teenage lawn­mow­ing ser­vice. In fact, appoint­ing peo­ple to run things is pretty much what pres­i­dents do, so how well he has done it is actu­ally pretty rel­e­vant to judg­ing his as a poten­tial president.

    Here are sev­eral arti­cles that have to do w/ how his cam­paign operates.

    Obama’s Brain Trust
    The candidate’s hand­picked team of top advis­ers has raised more than $250 mil­lion, out­ma­neu­vered the Clin­tons and cre­ated a for­mi­da­ble grass-roots polit­i­cal machine. So why doesn’t any­one know their names? http://​www​.rolling​stone​.com/​p​o​l​i​t​i​c​s​/​s​t​o​r​y​/​2​1​4​7​0​3​0​4​/​o​b​a​m​a​s​_​b​r​a​i​n​_​t​r​u​s​t​/print

    The Machin­ery of Hope
    Inside the grass-roots field oper­a­tion of Barack Obama, who is trans­form­ing the way polit­i­cal cam­paigns are run
    http://​www​.rolling​stone​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​s​t​o​r​y​/​1​9​1​0​6​3​2​6​/​t​h​e​_​m​a​c​h​i​n​e​r​y​_​o​f​_​h​o​p​e​/print

    Obama team remains unshaken
    (Deals w/ stick­ing to strat­egy after losses)
    http://​dyn​.politico​.com/​p​r​i​n​t​s​t​o​r​y​.​c​f​m​?​u​u​i​d​=​8​F​B​2​4​3​F​F​-​3​0​4​8​-​5​C​1​2​-​0​0​B​B​E​1​A​5​1​F​C67DB5

  49. moe99 said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:50 pm

    Brian, this must be the man­i­fes­ta­tion of pizazz envy. Up on the over­head at CNN​.com con­cern­ing the Palin speech:

    “RNC high­lights include slam after slam of Obama
    Watch Now: Live on CNN​.com »”

    Tell me truly, does this sound pres­i­den­tial to you?

    And Joe, in a word: the answer is “no” to your ques­tion. The two are not even remotely comparable.

  50. Bruce Fields said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:50 pm

    “You may remem­ber this pic­ture from your own col­lege days: remem­ber the per­son who looked at your pile, quoted you a total.…”

    That always seemed ter­ri­bly sad to me. When a textbook’s impor­tant to a course, it becomes some­thing you’ve invested a lot of time into – so when I see stu­dents sell­ing them back for half the price (or a lot less), then it seems to me like a sign some­thing has gone wrong.

    There are few things I like more than a great textbook.…

  51. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 3:54 pm

    I really want to hear Palin speak with­out some­one giv­ing her all the words, pauses, ad libs etc.
    Now I will say some­thing snarky about her. She looks like Peggy Hill, win­ner of the sub­sti­tute teacher of the year award.

  52. brian stouder said on September 4th, 2008 at 4:00 pm

    moe — my ques­tion for the big­time teevee/print news peo­ple is, what’s the REAL story about the phan­tom intro­duc­tory video for Sarah Palin?

    I heard msnbc at lunchtime report (with a straight face) that they scut­tled the video because Rudy’s speech ran dou­ble length, since he kept impro­vis­ing and going off-script.

    Sorry, I ain’t buy­ing that one. What is the dol­lar value of a live nation­wide broad­cast, on all the broad­cast net­works and all the cable news out­lets, per minute?

    How golden was the oppor­tu­nity to intro­duce this per­son? How could the for­mer mayor of New York City be allowed to just yap and yap, and lose the chance to show the video.…which is NOW released to the public.

    I betcha there was some­thing in that video that was just too inde­fen­si­ble (for what­ever reason)

  53. nancy said on September 4th, 2008 at 4:06 pm

    Brian, for once I believe the offi­cial expla­na­tion. I had my lap­top open and wasn’t pay­ing close atten­tion, but I thought Rudy was run­ning way long, milk­ing all his applause lines and was so awful I can only, once again, echo Roy, who said, he “may have been so warmly applauded in part for giv­ing the del­e­gates a good demon­stra­tion of how right they were not to have cho­sen him.”

    TV newsies wear ear­pieces so they can hear their direc­tor yelling, WRAP IT UP, but maybe all Rudy could hear was MORE YOU BIG STUD MOOOOORE.

    Sarah needed to be done by 11 p.m., and was sched­uled to start at 10:35 p.m. I wasn’t watch­ing the clock, but maybe she went long, too.

  54. Jolene said on September 4th, 2008 at 4:09 pm

    Here you go, Mary. This is a video of her speak­ing at an event that is a sort of “grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mony” for youth in her church. Not a for­mal speech. She sounds like Peggy Hill too. This is the film in which she seems to sug­gest that build­ing a nat­ural gas pipeline is God’s will.

    http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​Q​G​1​v​P​YbRB7k

  55. brian stouder said on September 4th, 2008 at 4:09 pm

    Hah!!

    Well, when (if ever!) I hear “MORE YOU BIG STUD MOOOOORE”, the machin­ery hears “WRAP IT UP”!

  56. moe99 said on September 4th, 2008 at 4:14 pm

    Well Mit­tens wins an award for being out to lunch. From Think Progress:

    Rom­ney mocks Gore for non-existent pri­vate jet.

    Last night, at the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion, for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor Mitt Rom­ney ® called for “the imme­di­ate drilling for more oil off of our shores” and fol­lowed with a per­sonal attack on Vice Pres­i­dent Al Gore that received thun­der­ous applause:

    And I have one more rec­om­men­da­tion for energy con­ser­va­tion — let’s keep Al Gore’s pri­vate jet on the ground!

    ThinkProgress con­tacted Gore spokesper­son Kalee Krei­der, who replied, “Gore doesn’t own a jet.”

    Oh, and the stock mar­ket is down, what is it? 300 or 350? Is that con­fi­dence or what? Espe­cially as the theme for the RNC last night was sup­posed to be “prosperity.”

    haha­ha­ha­ha­haha

  57. Catherine said on September 4th, 2008 at 4:38 pm

    Danny asks above: “Is a per­son only wor­thy of your respect if they embrace killing babies for what­ever rea­son of convenience?”

    First: Please stop being so insult­ing. Sec­ond: A per­son is wor­thy of my respect if they avoid intol­er­ance and hypocrisy to the best of their abil­ity. Third: The pre­vi­ous con­ver­sa­tion about absti­nence edu­ca­tion was inter­est­ing and enlight­en­ing. That’s the type of thing I like about this “place.” Not the scor­ing of points. (see #1)

  58. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 4:46 pm

  59. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 4th, 2008 at 4:47 pm

    Think McCain-Feingold, think Johnny Mac and Teddy K arm in arm: please don’t for­get how much the Repub­li­can estab­lish­ment has dis­liked and dis­tanced them­selves from this man over the last twenty years, and he keeps remind­ing them what they claim to stand for. I think McCain-Palin will work more with Sens. Obama and Biden in their White House than Obama-Biden would with Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin, and i think McCain will kick the stuff­ing out of quite a few entrenched inter­ests in Wash­ing­ton, R and D. I don’t see Obama doing that quite so well, and so throughly.

    As for Palin and gov­er­nance, i’m still think­ing i like what i see here: fol­low the links. http://​www​.anchor​ris​ing​.com/​b​a​r​n​a​c​l​e​s​/​0​0​6​2​8​0.html This isn’t the sub­sti­tute teacher at work, and it all holds up quite well ver­sus the leg­isla­tive efforts on the record of State Sen. Obama. Don’t hate him, don’t fear him, just think he’d waf­fle in the wind in Wash­ing­ton, and McCain will press the sil­ver lever and flush some vis­cous mate­r­ial down the Con­gres­sional com­mode — Bush can’t even find the build­ing at the other end of PA Ave., let alone find the restrooms.

    Gotta go set up for PTA night in the gym: God is an iron. Look it up.

  60. jcburns said on September 4th, 2008 at 4:53 pm

    “I think McCain-Palin will work more with Sens. Obama and Biden in their White House than Obama-Biden would with Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin”

    …based on? cos­mic rays? a ‘feel­ing’? your gut?

    Obama explic­itly laid out an agenda of coop­er­a­tion dur­ing his accep­tance speech. It’s as if the Repub­li­cans have been yelling “la la la la I can’t hear you.”

    I’ll lis­ten care­fully to McCain…or maybe read his words. or who­ever wrote his speech’s words.

  61. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 4:59 pm

    Dur­ing the par­tic­u­larly windy Rudy speech, he started out with this, “on one hand you’ve got a war hero mav­er­ick super­hero reformer .…,” and on the other hand you’ve got a…

    My 14 year old son filled in the words, “black guy.”

  62. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:03 pm

    First: Please stop being so insult­ing. Sec­ond: A per­son is wor­thy of my respect if they avoid intol­er­ance and hypocrisy to the best of their abil­ity. Third: The pre­vi­ous con­ver­sa­tion about absti­nence edu­ca­tion was inter­est­ing and enlight­en­ing. That’s the type of thing I like about this “place.” Not the scor­ing of points. (see #1)

    Cather­ine, per­haps you should save some of the right­eous indig­na­tion for your fel­low trav­ellers here who are derid­ing us con­ser­v­a­tives with exple­tive laden mewl­ings. My posts have been mild in com­par­i­son. Very mild. Man, talk about hypocrisy.

  63. moe99 said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    Obama’s response to the RNC today:

    You wouldn’t know that this is such a crit­i­cal elec­tion by watch­ing the con­ven­tion last night. I know we had our week. And the Repub­li­cans deserve theirs. But it’s been amaz­ing for me to watch over the last two nights. If you sit there, and you watch it. You’re hear­ing a lot about John McCain, and he’s got a com­pelling biog­ra­phy as a P.O.W.

    You’re hear­ing an awful lot about me. Most of which is not true.

    What you’re not hear­ing is a lot about you.

    You haven’t heard one word about how they’re going to make the health sys­tem work — so that when a union is nego­ti­at­ing with a com­pany it’s not all just a dis­cus­sion about higher pre­mi­ums and you guys can actu­ally start talk­ing about higher wages and benefits.

    You haven’t heard one word about how we’re gonna cre­ate more appren­tice­ship pro­grams like the ones we have here. Or give other peo­ple a chance to train in new trades.

    You haven’t heard one word about get­ting seri­ous about green and alter­na­tive energy. The kind of work that is result­ing in all the expan­sion and hir­ing here.

    You haven’t heard one word about how we’re going to strengthen unions so that work­ing peo­ple get a decent stake.

    You haven’t heard one word about how we’re going to improve math and sci­ence edu­ca­tion so that we can hire more engi­neers to cre­ate more prod­ucts in green technology.

    You haven’t heard one word about how we’re going to deal with any aspect of the econ­omy that is affect­ing you and your pocket day to day.

    Haven’t heard one word about it. Lit­er­ally. Two nights. They have not said a word about it. They have not said a word about it. They’ve had a lot to say about me. But they haven’t had any­thing to say about you.

    And the thing that I’m insist­ing on in this elec­tion is that we can’t keep play­ing the same polit­i­cal games we always play.

    — Barack Obama
    York, Penn­syl­va­nia
    Sep­tem­ber 4, 2008

  64. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:07 pm

    My 14 year old son filled in the words, “black guy.”

    In lib­eral fan­ta­sy­land, that is what would be said. Just like Nancy’s imag­i­nary “what-if” sce­nario wrt Obama’s daughters.

    I can’t hold that against a 14-year old, but you should know bet­ter, Mary. So now it isn’t enough to dis­agree on issues. Do we have to play make-believe? Some of you guys really do rel­ish wal­low­ing in the pol­i­tics of race.

  65. Catherine said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:15 pm

    Danny, I saw one entry with exple­tives above. Mostly, peo­ple are shar­ing infor­ma­tion and opin­ions. You’re the one toss­ing around the baby-killer label. Why is it so hard for you to keep it fac­tual and civil?

  66. paddyo' said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:19 pm

    I’m just another reader and Nancy-fan and ver­rrrry occa­sional post-er out here. But I am guess­ing that most other NN read­ers — in par­tic­u­lar those (Gas­man, Scout et al.) who called Danny out on his no-details defense of Palin — are like me in one regard: We are stil­l­l­l­l­lll wait­ing for him to respond with sub­stance, not more of today’s feint-and-dodge, mis­di­rec­tion and subject-change. Sounds a lot like the level of rhetoric issu­ing from the podium in St. Paul the last cou­ple of days: All heat, and no light.

  67. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:26 pm

    I am fac­tual. Look at yesterday’s posts regard­ing “knuckle drag­ging cous­in­fucks.” Go back and look at ear­lier posts this week when I was not around much.

    Cather­ine. It is dif­fi­cult enough to keep on top of all of the com­ments to which I want to respond. Do not dilute this thread or future threads with incor­rect asser­tions. Keep it straight and be hon­est. Please.

  68. Jolene said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:34 pm

    Danny, if you are really inter­ested in com­mu­ni­cat­ing w/ peo­ple, you might want to resist impulses such as those that prompt you to refer to what they have writ­ten as “mewl­ings”. Not a great opening.

  69. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:38 pm

    Well, pad­dyo, I have responded with some sub­stance, but I have a lot of peo­ple to respond to and some who are mak­ing stuff up (see above). And I seem to be mostly alone here. Which is okay. I have broad shoul­ders, but my atten­tion is divided.

    So don’t expect me to respond sat­is­fac­to­rily to your every whim. I am home sick with the flu whilst doing a deep clean­ing of the house after three weeks of vis­i­tors too.

  70. LAMary said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:40 pm

    Danny, I come from a fam­ily of nice white mid­dle class staunch, like giv­ing lots of money, going to con­ven­tions, run­ning for office Repub­li­cans. All except me. My son was fill­ing in the words he might have heard from his uncles and aunts and cousins. No make­be­lieve. It’s not as open as the racism of my father’s gen­er­a­tion, but it’s there.

  71. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:42 pm

    Danny, if you are really inter­ested in com­mu­ni­cat­ing w/ peo­ple, you might want to resist impulses such as those that prompt you to refer to what they have writ­ten as “mewl­ings”. Not a great opening.

    It wasn’t an open­ing. It was buried in the mid­dle of my umpteenth post today and well after (like sev­eral hours after) I and other con­ser­v­a­tives had been referred to as “fuck­ing pussy-assed whiners.”

  72. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:45 pm

    Okay, Mary. I under­stand. Sorry if I sounded rough towards you. Not a great day.

  73. paddyo' said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:48 pm

    Fine, Danny — glad you finally explained why you STILL haven’t replied to Gasman’s very rea­son­able, even-mannered lay­ing out of ques­tions more than FIVE hours ago …
    Even though you HAVE seen fit to post NINE other times in that period …

    Hey, man, I’m just sayin’ …

    But if it’s the flu, I wouldn’t wish that on any­body (any­body who posts at NN, any­way), so get well soon, and get to those dust bun­nies, laun­dry loads and crumbly car­pets soon, too — so you can finally (we hope) answer Gasman’s (I’ll say it again) very rea­son­able recita­tion of ques­tions that any­one defend­ing Palin and whin­ing about crit­i­cisms against her ought to be able to answer. Hey, Danny, you’re a long­timer here, you’re bet­ter than that. Step on up, boy, don’t be afraid.

  74. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    John, I have got­ten through about three-quarters of the speech you sent. I stand cor­rected. It was very good speech, full of details and some of them which I really agree with.

    For instance, I like his idea about tax breaks for American-job-creating com­pa­nies. And I also liked what he had to say about a few other issues.

    I do believe that McCain has a good record of reach­ing across the aisle (which is not nec­es­sar­ily a strong point for me) and I think that Obama strug­gles to assure he will do the same from his perspective.

    But, John. You were right, but more impor­tantly, I was wrong.

  75. Suzi said on September 4th, 2008 at 5:53 pm

    Did you catch how she prac­ti­cally called her­self an energy engi­neer last night?
    Palin is quite an expert on the Alaska envi­ron­ment, too. Who needs sci­ence?
    http://​ap​.google​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​A​L​e​q​M​5​h​3​E​H​5​j​d​_​u​y​W​A​F​t​v​L​A​U​a​k​y​_​b​D​G​B​h​g​D​9​3​011S81

    I’m still mad about the attack on the librarian.

  76. Jolene said on September 4th, 2008 at 6:01 pm

    FYI: Obama is appear­ing on Bill O’Rielly this evening, well before McCain’s speech, but dur­ing the foot­ball game on NBC.

  77. Suzi said on September 4th, 2008 at 6:23 pm

    Danny, have you had a walk on the beach lately? Good ther­apy for polit­i­cal non­sense over­load. I’m gonna go make a Bloody Mary. No Kool Aid for me!
    Should be a good OhRe­ally Show tonight!

  78. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 6:35 pm

    Mary, Sue left over my post about the Stone Bush biopic (even though every­one else here was was hav­ing a big ol’ lib­eral love-fest and I only made one mildly snide com­ment) and that chick from Mary­land left who first inferred I was a racist and then insisted I was a troll after I called her out for it.

    Gas­man, it is not so much that I dis­agree with you that Palin may be unfit. It is more that the reac­tion around here has been so reflex­ive and pre­ma­ture. I say we give it a few weeks. See how she looks after the press gets some time to run sto­ries other than about her preg­nant 17-year old daugh­ter. I may be sur­prised and am will­ing to change my mind still, but as I said a few days ago, at first blush, I really like this pick. The first female VP nom­i­nee from the GOP.

    You see, it makes me a lit­tle sick to see con­ser­v­a­tives being con­stantly (and unfairly, IMO) crit­i­cized as racists, sex­ists and homo­phobes. I am none of these. So has done my heart good to see blacks, his­pan­ics and women at cab­i­net level posi­tions, as Supreme Court nom­i­nees, etc., within con­ser­v­a­tive ranks But often, it is never given any credit. The Left says that the minori­ties we appoint are stu­pid, uncle toms and every­thing else bad. And I think the same thing is being attempted with Palin before we really know much about her at all. And I think it is wrong.

    So, a lot about Palin will be resolved in the near future for me.

    Regard­ing rea­sons to vote con­ser­v­a­tive. I doubt I could con­vince you, but here is why I usu­ally do.

    1) I want partial-birth abor­tion out­lawed and I want every­thing pos­si­ble done in the way of couselling, mak­ing adop­tions eas­ier and cheaper, etc. to make sure that less early-term preg­nan­cies are ter­mi­nated. I know that a lot of Democ­rats feel the same, but they are as beholden to the spe­cial inter­ests that pro­mote abor­tion as birth con­trol as many Repub­li­cans are to big busi­ness. They can’t seem to break free and do the right things. Clin­ton refused to out­law partial-birth abortion.

    2) Pros­e­cut­ing the War on Ter­ror: I trust McCain to do the right thing in all ways pos­si­ble on this front. His bonafides are unim­peach­able. End of story.

    3) Tax­a­tion: I am not much of a fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tive. I don’t think that Jesus was either. I give to the poor. Directly. A lot. And I don’t live high on the hog myself. I also sup­port a few char­i­ties that I like. But as many of you know, some char­i­ties are crooked and take the money that you intend for good and spend it on themselves.

    To me, the gov­erne­ment is like a big, cor­rupt char­ity. I do not trust gov­erne­ment for redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth. That is where I usu­ally line up with the smaller-governement stance. Though I know full well that both par­ties are guilty of abscond­ing with our money, I do find it more odi­ous when the guys I usu­ally vote for do it.

    4) Finally, the low­est impor­tance for me. Same-sex mar­riage trou­bles me and I am not alone. Obama says the fol­low­ing in the speech that JC sent:I know there are dif­fer­ences on same-sex mar­riage, but surely we can agree that our gay and les­bian broth­ers and sis­ters deserve to visit the per­son they love in a hos­pi­tal and to live lives free of discrimination.

    I agree with that, but again, being beholden to spe­cial inter­ests makes me think that any promise he makes to mod­er­ate the more lib­eral views in the Dem party will be null and void on Inar­gu­ra­tion Day.

  79. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 6:38 pm

    Good idea with that, Suzi. My wife and I both got the flu yes­ter­day which just com­pounded the mis­ery of the sad­ness of our sis­ter and nephews hav­ing to leave on the plane yes­ter­day. We keep telling each other we need to go to the beach today and be sick there. But then one or the other of us keeps falling asleep. Maybe we’ll do it this evening.

    Suzi, that OhRe­ally com­ment cracked me up. My youngest nephew asked if we could watch the “Oh Really Fac­tor” a cou­ple of years ago when he was seven and we were just click­ing around the TV guide at my par­ents house.

  80. paddyo' said on September 4th, 2008 at 6:40 pm

    Props to you, Danny, for reply­ing to Gas­man. I’ll get out of the way and let the mul­ti­logue continue …

  81. MichaelG said on September 4th, 2008 at 6:47 pm

    I think I know enough about Gov. Palin to enter­tain some seri­ous doubts about her. She seems to have a ten­dency to be arro­gant and auto­cratic and to per­son­al­ize things as when she basi­cally required senior man­agers in Wasilla to take a loy­alty oath to her. This arose again in a big way when she used her guber­na­to­r­ial pow­ers for per­sonal rea­sons to can the state’s chief law enforce­ment offi­cer because he wouldn’t fire her for­mer brother in law. She has a ten­dency to use her office to advance her reli­gious agenda. This can be seen in her book ban­ning efforts. She has made numer­ous state­ments in which she used her reli­gious beliefs to sup­port polit­i­cal and geo-political under­tak­ings. She scooped up large sums of money from ear­marks on the one hand while con­demn­ing the prac­tice on the other. She has been less than can­did in her state­ments about her posi­tions with respect to the bridge to nowhere and about where the money went. She has used her preg­nant daugh­ter and prospec­tive son in law to advance her polit­i­cal for­tunes while con­demn­ing any­body who would com­ment about the prac­tice. She claims to be on board with Sen. McCain and his “Coun­try First” slo­gans while main­tain­ing a very close and long term asso­ci­a­tion with an extreme seces­sion­ist group. Can you imag­ine the screams if Obama had a sim­i­lar asso­ci­a­tion? With these and all the other things every­body else is point­ing out it seems to me that this is some­one whom I don’t want any­where near the White House. I’ll be the first to admit that she scares the crap out of me. What have I omit­ted? What else is there that we don’t know yet? What­ever else, I don’t believe that this woman is stu­pid. I think one would under­es­ti­mate her at one’s peril.

  82. joodyb said on September 4th, 2008 at 7:05 pm

    in response to the anchor ris­ing post, did some­one already post this one? i’m too dizzy to recall if i saw this here or else­where. this seems just as valid as the other in terms of blo­gec­tiv­ity:
    http://​mud​flats​.word​press​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​0​9​/​0​4​/​a​-​l​e​t​t​e​r​-​a​b​o​u​t​-​s​a​r​a​h​-​p​a​l​i​n​-​f​r​o​m​-​a​n​n​e​-​k​i​l​kenny/

  83. Suzi said on September 4th, 2008 at 7:13 pm

    Danny — “Suzi, that OhRe­ally com­ment cracked me up.” Tip o’ the hat to your nephew and Keith Olber­mann for that. I hope you guys get a walk out at Del Mar … or Tor­rey Pines … or the Cove … Coro­n­ado … ahh­hhh. OB at sunset!

    On par­tial birth abor­tion — shouldn’t we really use med­ical terms for the pro­ce­dure referred to? My under­stand­ing  — and I’m not a med­ical pro­fes­sional — is that pba is a made-up term from the anti-reprodcutive rights folks. My sister-in-law is a deliv­ery nurse and has said that some­times pro­ce­dures like that are nec­es­sary, for exam­ple, for the woman’s health when there is a fetus that has no brain or is hydro­cephalic. Sad, but it happens.

  84. Suzi said on September 4th, 2008 at 7:19 pm

    “I think one would under­es­ti­mate her at one’s peril.” Right! Look what we have in the White House now — cut from the same cloth, I think. She might make an ade­quate gov­er­nor in a cou­ple of years, maybe she’ll learn some­thing of deco­rum and church/state pro­to­col. Today she seems like a wolf-pup mur­der­ing attack bitch with a taste for blood and power. But not too deep and way too ide­o­log­i­cal (Chris­t­ian warior).

  85. Gasman said on September 4th, 2008 at 7:30 pm

    JC,
    This is how the online Oxford Dic­tio­nary defines “hypocrisy”:

    “The prac­tice of claim­ing to have moral stan­dards or beliefs to which one’s own behav­ior does not con­form; pretense.”

    Pretty much sounds like Palin decry­ing fed­eral ear­marks after accept­ing mil­lions while mayor of Wasilla. Sounds like the entire Repub­li­can party decry­ing Obama’s lack of expe­ri­ence while lion­iz­ing that of Palin. Sounds like McCain denounc­ing the evan­gel­i­cal right for years and then hope­lessly pan­der­ing to them to draw them into his tent. Pretty much sounds like the Rs con­cern­ing the econ­omy, for­eign rela­tions, and the war.

    Shall I go on? I’ve got hun­dreds more.

  86. alex said on September 4th, 2008 at 7:38 pm

    Danny, you’re yankin’ peo­ples’ chains. No one goes from being that obtuse to this sen­si­ble. Shit, I could even agree with your per­fectly rea­son­able posi­tion on abortion.

    In fact, Danny, you know what I think would go an even longer way toward min­i­miz­ing demand than any of the ideas out there? Tak­ing the shame and stigma out of race mixing.

    So Obama’s the best pro-life pres­i­dent there’s ever been as far as I’m concerned.

  87. Suzi said on September 4th, 2008 at 7:53 pm

    “Pretty much sounds like the Rs con­cern­ing the econ­omy … “
    Inter­est­ing that post-Palin, the mar­ket had the worst day in 2 months.

  88. moe99 said on September 4th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

    http://​tinyurl​.com/​5upxnb

    an African Amer­i­can perspective.

  89. caliban said on September 4th, 2008 at 8:16 pm

    Palin’s speech was writ­ten by Matthew Scully, whose job was to pro­vide a veneer of open­ness and mod­er­a­tion to ide­o­logues. As with McCain, God knows what he believes. Of course, the implicit con­vo­lu­tions and con­tra­dic­tions inher­ent in the mes­sage are as con­vo­luted as a patch of wis­te­ria, which South­ern­ers know is the only thing so pri­mally self-preserving a force of nature it can devour kudzu alive.

    Inva­sions of pri­vacy by the media are ema­na­tions of dlite attacks, but con­ser­v­a­tives are free to attack the idea of any Con­sti­tu­tional right to pri­vacy as nonex­is­tent. I’d like to believe that if Chelsea Clin­ton turned up preg­nant in ’96, Repub­li­cans would have said that was a fam­ily mat­ter, but an idiot could see that was a fat chance. And the Clinton’s are smart enough to under­stand that edu­cat­ing kids about con­tra­cep­tion is an intel­li­gent choice, both life-affirming and pro­tec­tive of family.

    It would also be con­sis­tent with the Demo­c­ra­tic plat­form that lines up with the Amer­i­can Coun­cil of Catholic Bish­ops’ idea about mak­ing abor­tion as rare as pos­si­ble. The Repub­li­cans excised that idea from their platform.

    She will appar­ently con­tinue to claim she opposed the bridge to nowhere. In this instance, she’s not a hyp­ocrite. She’s a liar. (Too harsh? Pre­fab­ri­ca­tor? Exec­u­tive exper­ince at fudg­ing?) She woofed it at the trough, and when the Bridge became an object of ridicule, she took the money and ran to other pro­grams she claimed were more impor­tant for her state. No doubt, they were. They couldn’t be less important.

    Is it to much to ask that Amer­i­cans have the hind­sight to under­stand that Con­gres­sional didn’t think even Bushco could lie with such aban­don? Why is it that there are still Amer­i­cans so dumb or recal­ci­trant they won’t admit that the case for the inva­sion was com­pelling and that it was a soggy tis­sue of lies at the same time? If the Pres­i­dent tells you some­thing, is it your sworn duty to ques­tion his hon­esty? His judge­ment, yeah. Alegedly incon­tro­vert­ible evi­dence in an emer­gent situation?

    There was a dif­fer­ence at the time that peo­ple seem to have for­got­ten.
    the Democrat’s that voted with W believed he was telling the truth about some sort of immi­nent threat. Repub­li­cans were vot­ing a Party line. In the first place, there’s the orig­i­nal inva­sion of Iraq by W’s dad. Kuwait was slant drilling and steal­ing oil. There’s the his­tor­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion that Kuwait was just made up. Some­body in the pre­vi­ous Bush admin­is­tra­tion sent an emis­sary to Sad­dam and said that’s your oil, they’re steal­ing it, and we don’t care what you do about it. Slas­sic Cartwright moveto induce an excuse.
    where is April Glaspie these days?

    The inva­sion is not a topic of con­ver­sa­tion for Repub­li­can con­ven­tion­eers. Sarah Solip­sist thought it was all about oil, but now she doesn’t It was. Like the abject spec­ta­cle of the USA suck­ing up to a bunch of Stans to run pipelines. Like Palin and Alaskastan.

    Lex­is­nexis doesn’t show a hit for Afghanistan and terr. My bad, ter­ror­ism. Let’s tryhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/technology/01link.htmlakistan. Could some­body from the National press ask the Great Moose Hunter if she’s ever even this the slight­est the slight­est con­sid­er­a­tion. When Repub­li­cans bring up the prox­im­ity of Rus­sia and Alaska, sorry, that’s to dumb to con­sider, if you don’t mean a Ceilei, with the res­i­dent Russ­ian sub ski­ip­per., and Mark Knop­pler pro­vid­ing per­fect music.

    My ex and I have expe­ri­ence with employ­ees and fis­cal respon­si­bil­ity. W don’t think that qual­i­fies us for any­thing. It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with rais­ing a per­fect daugh­ter. Sarah Palin ques­tion­ing Barack’s agility to lead is really some­thing , ludicrous.

    It’s not impos­si­ble Amer­i­can vot­ers are dumb enough to buy this.

    W was a draft dodger. Clin­ton wasn’t. Kerry pulled com­rades out of the Mekong under fire. There is proof these things hap­pened. Get­ting shot down doesn’t make you a hero when what you were doing in the first place was a war crime.

    John McCain backed Kerry’s inves­ti­ga­tions. Includ­ing every­thing to do with the Rea­gan Gang. Includ­ing Ollie North, Cheney, Rummy, etc. McCain bailed for polit­i­cal pur­poses. Kerry thought McCain was his ally. McCain slunk off.

    Then there was the inves­ti­ga­tion of bcci. McCain started out hot on that one too. Kerry nailed these mis­crants too. McCain bailed again.

    What says more about the mav­er­ick bull­shit and McCain’s char­ac­ter is how the lit­tle bas­tard hid behind his across the line col­league. He let Kerry take the lead in every­thing and McCai cclaimed to be a mav­er­ick. Then he stabbed Kerry in the back. All any­bidy with a brain needs to know about John McCain is that most of what he claims in the sen­ate, John Kerry accom­plishe, And when Jerome Corsi and Swift-boat came around, McCain bailed like Poppy Bush.

    He’res a ques­tion or two

    Did you think it was fine when Ray­gu­nistas raped and mur­dered Mary­knoll mums because they were free­dom fight­ers. Kerry exposed these asholes.

    None of this may be impor­tant.
    but if you don’t think you’re civil liv­er­ties have been trashed in the inter­est of peo­ple we sure as shit don’t want to run our gov­ern­ment. Kerry’s story. We were float­ing along and all hell blew up. W’s: We were run­ning low on Maker’s Mark.

    Kerry was heroic in bat­tle. That’s what every­body there says hap­pened. John McCain claimed he had Kerry’s back. He proved to be the most bask-stabbing peece of shit ever hit the face of America.

    McCain isgned on to Kerry pros­e­cu­tor mode and he just fuck­ing aban­doned him. McCain knows Kerry was a war hero if that’s pos­si­ble. More than being a sky pilot. He ought to say so. He ought to admit to what W did was run­ningfrom­ser­vice like a chick­en­shit chickenhawk.

    When did Sarah Pali n express an idea that wasn’t horse­shit She geliebes her fam­ily is should be enti­tled to pri­vacy. She doesnt beliebe any­body els ise is enti­tled to pri­vacy.
    She believes it’s the abso­lut right for every­body to hound another kid id the same sit­u­a­tion about their choice? No, she things she knows better.

    Bridge to Nowhere , she lied her ass about that. Way I see Repub­li­cans will lie their ass about any­thing. Biggest lie, this revolt­ing bitch claimed she opposed the bridge to nowhere. No she didn’t. She can take this to nowhere but if she does shes a fuck­ing liar. Kerry wa sesented with some­body ckaim­ing to be the pres­i­dent. Was he sup­posed to find out he was a bald­faced liar?

    Bush II and Bush I they sim­ply lied. Blam­ing their per­fidy on Democ­rats is unjust.

  90. caliban said on September 4th, 2008 at 8:33 pm

    t I remem­ber of the Grande. Arthur Browne fire. I never saw any of the great Detroit Bands at the Grande. Creme, but Pro­col at the teen cen­ter play­ibbd SAalty Dawd, scr, mc5, basi­cally fuck everey­body else, not even close.

  91. moe99 said on September 4th, 2008 at 8:51 pm

    Thought of the mild man­nered one when I read this on the Mak­ing Light site, except Patrick Nielsen-Hayden is pretty po’d about it:

    http://​nielsen​hay​den​.com/​m​a​k​i​n​g​l​i​g​h​t​/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​s​/​0​1​0​5​3​8​.​h​t​m​l​#​010538

    “Sep­tem­ber 04, 2008
    Slime, and sev­eral answers to slime

    Posted by Patrick at 04:32 PM * 35 comments

    “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a com­mu­nity orga­nizer, except that you have actual respon­si­bil­i­ties.”
    —Repub­li­can vice-presidential nom­i­nee Sarah Palin, accep­tance speech, Sep­tem­ber 3, 2008

    A. Ser­wer on Tapped:

    [C]ommunity orga­niz­ers aren’t just those rabble-rousers who help keep peo­ple from get­ting evicted or protest police bru­tal­ity — they’re basi­cally the ordi­nary peo­ple across the polit­i­cal spec­trum who to try hold gov­ern­ment account­able to its cit­i­zens. Mock­ing that really shows how much con­tempt the party has for ordi­nary peo­ple. Repub­li­cans look down their noses at alleged “elites” while direct­ing their anger at com­mu­nity orga­niz­ers, who actu­ally live and work among the peo­ple politi­cians only pay atten­tion to when they’re look­ing for votes. But it’s not sur­pris­ing that a party that has spent the last eight years run­ning gov­ern­ment into the ground would be irri­tated by an active cit­i­zenry demand­ing that gov­ern­ment actu­ally do its job, rather than sim­ply let­ting incom­pe­tent pols go about their busi­ness. If there’s any take­away from this theme, it’s that the right would rather Amer­i­cans shut up and fall in line.

    If I had spent my may­oralty sub­ject­ing peo­ple to loy­alty tests and try­ing to ban books, a com­mu­nity orga­nizer might make me ner­vous, too. If I had been mayor of a town that was left with 20 mil­lion dol­lars in debt after my tenure, I wouldn’t be on TV talk­ing about how well I had han­dled my respon­si­bil­i­ties and how awful com­mu­nity orga­niz­ers are. Because, after all, com­mu­nity orga­niz­ers have the respon­si­bil­ity of help­ing reg­u­lar peo­ple cope with the messes irre­spon­si­ble politi­cians leave behind.

    Christo­pher Hayes at the Nation:

    [M]y dad is a com­mu­nity orga­nizer, so lemme spell this out: the dif­fer­ence between a com­mu­nity orga­nizer and a politi­cian is that a com­mu­nity orga­nizer can’t tell any­one what to do. They have to lis­ten. So they can’t order books banned from a library to indulge their own reli­gious sen­si­bil­i­ties. They can’t fire some­one because they didn’t fol­low orders to fire an estranged fam­ily mem­ber. They can’t ram through a $15 mil­lion dol­lar sports com­plex that leaves their local town groan­ing under­neath the debt. Unlike politi­cians, they don’t have any power other than the power of peo­ple who want to see some­thing changed.

    Al Gior­dano at The Field:

    Palin couldn’t help her­self last night. She had to say, in a few fate­ful words, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘com­mu­nity orga­nizer,’ except that you have actual respon­si­bil­i­ties.”
    Trans­la­tion: I got elected and there­fore I am bet­ter than all of you!

    Joe Klein at Time magazine’s “Swamp­land” blog:

    This morn­ing, I received a press release from a group called Catholic Democ­rats about the work — the mis­sion, the wit­ness — that Obama per­formed after he got out of col­lege. Here’s the first para­graph:
    Catholic Democ­rats is express­ing sur­prise and shock that Repub­li­can vice pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Sarah Palin’s accep­tance speech tonight mocked her opponent’s work in the 1980s for the Catholic Cam­paign for Human Devel­op­ment. She belit­tled Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Barack Obama’s expe­ri­ence as a com­mu­nity orga­nizer in Catholic parishes on the South Side of Chicago, work he under­took instead of pur­su­ing a lucra­tive career on Wall Street. In her accep­tance speech, Ms. Palin said, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a com­mu­nity orga­nizer, except that you have actual respon­si­bil­i­ties.” Com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing is at the heart of Catholic Social Teach­ing to end poverty and pro­mote social justice.

    So here is what Giu­liani and Palin didn’t know: Obama was work­ing for a group of churches that were con­cerned about their parish­ioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned peo­ple recover and get the ser­vices they needed — job train­ing, help with hous­ing and so forth — from the local gov­ern­ment. It was, dare I say it, the Lord’s work — the sort of mis­sion Jesus preached. (As opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a “task from God.”)

    This is what Palin and Giu­liani were mock­ing. They were mak­ing fun of a young man’s deci­sion “to serve a cause greater than him­self,” in the words of John McCain. They were, there­fore, mock­ing one of their candidate’s favorite mes­sages. Obama served the poor for three years, then went to law school. To describe this ser­vice — the first thing he did out of col­lege, the sort of ser­vice every college-educated Amer­i­can should per­form, in some form or other — as any­thing other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cyn­i­cal in the extreme.

    Per­haps La Pasion­aria of the North­ern Slope didn’t know this when she read the words they gave her. But Giu­liani — a pro­foundly lapsed Catholic, who must have met more than a few reli­gious folk toil­ing in the inner cities — should have known. (“I don’t even know what that is,” he sneered.”) What a shame­ful performance.

    Christy Hardin Smith on Fire­doglake:
    Clean­ing up a local riverbed or a walk­ing trail with your kid’s scout troop? Repub­li­cans think you’re a loser.
    Work­ing with a job train­ing or lit­er­acy pro­gram to help folks move from wel­fare to work? Repub­li­cans think your efforts deserve ridicule. Pro­mot­ing a spay and neuter pro­gram at your local ani­mal shel­ter? Repub­li­cans are laugh­ing at you. Vol­un­teer at your church pantry to help the least of these? Repub­li­cans are mock­ing you.

    Christy nails it. If you spend any time what­so­ever doing stuff to help other peo­ple out, these freaks gath­ered in the Xcel Energy Cen­ter despise you.
    No more mercy. These peo­ple need to be more than defeated. They need to be dri­ven from our pub­lic life. ”

  92. Calliope said on September 4th, 2008 at 9:27 pm

    Moe, did you see great com­ment quoted on that thread? It’s from politico​.com: the Demo­c­ra­tic email of the day:

    “Mrs. Palin needs to be reminded that Jesus Christ was a com­mu­nity orga­nizer and Pon­tius Pilate was a governor.”

    http://​tinyurl​.com/​5kmsjw

  93. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 9:31 pm

    Alex, I think you must be yank­ing my chain. Why don’t you try respond­ing to a cou­ple of dozen peo­ple who are in extreme dis­agree­ment with you but tak­ing dif­fer­ent tones and try keep­ing your own tone even.

    My early responses were very mea­sured and mild com­pared to some com­ments that pass for wis­dom around here. My later response took longer because some­one was basi­cally ask­ing my phi­los­o­phy on what I think it is more cor­rect polit­i­cally. Noth­ing incon­gru­ous in the least.

  94. nancy said on September 4th, 2008 at 9:45 pm

    I was going to shut com­ments for a cool-off period, but you all seem to have found some equi­lib­rium, so the floor remains open. Here’s what I have to say, and I’ll lay off the polit­i­cal posts for a while:

    I hear a lot of crow­ing on the right wing about “fear” today, that Sarah Palin rep­re­sents Democ­rats’ worst night­mare, blah blah blah. Maybe that’s true. I’d iden­tify what I’m feel­ing now as a mix of anger, dread and fatigue, and fear is cer­tainly a part of the first two. But here it is, in the plainest way I can say it:

    I am not buy­ing what these peo­ple are sell­ing.

    I never was much of a cus­tomer, but I was always will­ing to lis­ten, and it wor­ries me now that I no longer am, but there it is. It’s never been clearer to me what the stakes are for this elec­tion, and they boil down to four more years of more of the same. More tor­ture, more civil-liberties abuses, more war. (Have you heard? We are all Geor­gians now.) More Regents Uni­ver­sity law-school grads vet­ting attor­neys gen­eral for loy­alty to the Cause. More impunity for Wall Street crooks and thieves to play Las Vegas with mort­gage funds. More incom­pe­tent boobs pro­moted in gov­ern­ment offices, fol­lowed by, “See? Gov­ern­ment can’t work.” More cul­ture war, in which we parse who is or isn’t a real Amer­i­can, a good mother, a God-fearing leader, a fetus’ friend or enemy. Dis­agree, and you’re an elit­ist. More code words. More purity balls. More hilar­i­ous jokes about B. Hus­sein Obama and his wife, the one who hates whitey and dares to wear sleeve­less dresses.

    In the past, I’ve had my dif­fer­ences with these folks, but I never wished them ill. I’m start­ing to do so. This both­ers me.

    I’m real tired of this. I’m just sick to death with it.

    WSJ just put a story up on their main page. Hed: McCain to Vow End of ‘Ran­cor’ Well, that’ll be a neat trick, after last night.

  95. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 9:54 pm

    Gawd, we’re lis­ten­ing to Cindy McCain now and she is really kinda blow­ing it. My wife is killing me. From her sickbed perch on the couch she keeps mak­ing snor­ing sounds and then insert­ing com­ments to cut the speech short like: “And now, with­out fur­ther ado. John McCain!”

    But no, Cindy will not stop. She keeps going and going and going.

    Whoops finally.

  96. basset said on September 4th, 2008 at 9:56 pm

    cul­ture war, exactly.

    delib­er­ately chang­ing the topic… Nance, how’d you like that last Gib­son novel? me, I was a huge fan of his early stuff but I just didn’t get this one.

  97. Linda said on September 4th, 2008 at 9:58 pm

    Danny, the rea­son that this nom­i­na­tion made so many peo­ple mad was because it was crass pan­der­ing. I did polit­i­cal can­vass­ing two days after, and peo­ple rolled their eyes, espe­cially women. There are lots of women with more expe­ri­ence than she has (Kay Bai­ley Hutchi­son, any­one?) that could have been picked. The roll­out was ludi­crous, too. Some­body has for­eign pol­icy expe­ri­ence because their state is next to Rus­sia? I salute any­body who can say that with a straight face. I, too, wish there was more focus on her polit­i­cal posi­tions, too. I can’t wait to hear what the aver­age woman – who she is sup­posed to win over – would say when they found out that if her daugh­ter were raped, she would want her to bear her rapist’s child. Believe me, that would peel off a lot of votes right there. The attempts at book ban­ning, and demand of mass res­ig­na­tions upon may­oral elec­tion, is dis­turb­ing, too. We have enough theo­cratic and power-hungry peo­ple in office. And as the “mav­er­ick” and “out­sider” opposed to fed­eral ear­marks? She got over $27 mil­lion in ear­marks for a town of about 6,000. Trust me when I tell you that this doesn’t hap­pen for mav­er­icks, but only the well-connected. She is as gen­uine as a three dol­lar bill.

  98. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 9:59 pm

    Two funny com­ments I read/heard today.

    1) Scout call­ing Sarah Palin, Cari­bou Bar­bie (with attribution).

    2) Some­one on the radio said that prob­a­bly the only way that the preg­nancy of Bris­tol Palin could’ve been kept secret is if it had been John Edwards’ baby. Then the press would have sat on it for months.

  99. alex said on September 4th, 2008 at 10:37 pm

    Troll. Chicken lawyer.

  100. alex said on September 4th, 2008 at 10:46 pm

    “We’ve gotta stop send­ing $700 bil­lion a year to coun­tries that don’t like us very much…”

    Did he mean Iraq?

  101. alex said on September 4th, 2008 at 10:58 pm

    Well, at least he made a call to end par­ti­san ran­cor. It received luke­warm applause.

  102. beb said on September 4th, 2008 at 11:02 pm

    Also related to chang­ing the subject…

    The release of Google’s browser, Chrome, brings up the ques­tion of just how much does Google know about us neti­zans. With Chrome they will surely be track­ing all the sites we visit, all our search queries, index our e-mails.. Etc. Will Google know more about us than the Depart­ment of Vater­land Securities.

  103. alex said on September 4th, 2008 at 11:07 pm

    That lib­eral media.

    They keep pan­ning to a sign that says “Mavrick” and a woman with a grotesque col­la­gen job in a bad color.

  104. Danny said on September 4th, 2008 at 11:47 pm

    Troll. Chicken lawyer

    Huhn? What does that mean?

  105. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 5th, 2008 at 12:02 am

    Fire­fox. I vote for Fire­fox — who’s with me!

  106. MichaelG said on September 5th, 2008 at 12:11 am

    More to the point what does ” the only way that the preg­nancy of Bris­tol Palin could’ve been kept secret is if it had been John Edwards’ baby. Then the press would have sat on it for months” mean?

  107. Gasman said on September 5th, 2008 at 12:35 am

    Danny,
    Thank you for your 6:35 post. That is music to my ears — or should it be eyes? You clearly artic­u­lated your posi­tions and I respect them. I don’t nec­es­sar­ily agree with them, but there is prob­a­bly some mid­dle ground on at least one point. I won’t launch into any dia­tribes (for once) regard­ing my lib­eral views on your opin­ions, but I come by them hon­estly and also from a Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive. If your com­pa­tri­ots on your side of the aisle would sim­ply do as you did, they’d be more likely to get folks on my side of the aisle to lis­ten. I hon­estly try to address issues and not resort to invec­tives. If I have trans­gressed and appeared to be uncivil, please accept my apology.

  108. caliban said on September 5th, 2008 at 12:54 am

    How does get­ting your ass shot down He clawed his way out of his Keat­ing ignominy and he did it over Kerry’s back make you a war hero? Waht make’s McCains story more con­pelling and more credigle than Kerry’s And diddn’t mcCain jap on Kerry, whose inves­tiga­tive excel­lence expose Repub­li­cans as creeps that would do any­thing and debi­grate any war heros actions if they thought it might mean some gen­e­fit with a moronic elec­tora­tee? What a hero. Why the hell doesn’t he just shut up? He betrayed Kerry, when Kerry exposed cor­rup­tion. He’s not a hero.

    He clawed his way to respectabil­ity, he did it on Kerry’s back, and he stabbed Kerry in the back by not repu­di­at­ing the Swift Boat liars when he knew they were lying the­hit asses off. Kerry exposed Repub­li­cans as frauds and mur­der­ers, so they hated him and sank to pre­vi­ous lev­els of abject char­ac­ter assassination.

    Even so, they still had to cheat at the bal­lot box, and if you don’t think Ohio was roffed in 2004, well you’re an idiot.

    Now things are all good? Cheney is so rich he could fuck up Amer­i­can pol­i­tics for years to come if some­body doesn’t put his prof­i­teer­ing ass in jail. Far as prof­i­teer­ing, there’s that Alaska pipeline. and that was a big­ger ear­mark than the Bridge that Sarah thought was hunky dory until it was ridiculed and she doled out the cash. These peo­ple are the biggest liars in history.

    I’m a Catholic and I can hon­estly say we would have spent the money to bet­ter effect for more poor peo­ple. Actu­ally, in the last and the first part of the new Cen­turies, Catholics got killed by Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives and their Cen­tral Amer­i­can sssur­ro­gates try­ing to get social jus­tice for oppressed peo­ple. In the after­math of Ray­gu­nism, the Jeb­bies and the Mary­knoll nuns seemed to be Com­monists that needed rap­ing and slaugh­ter­ing, and mass graves.

    This is the sort of foriegn pol­icy Neo­con gov­er­ment sup­ports, so respect for lige and parad­ing Terry Schi­avvo is’n’t surprising.

    These bas­tards are shame­less and you can’t under­es­ti­mate the stu­pid­ity of Aner­i­cans. Saudis blew up the WTC, you idiots. This was made up shit. Oeo­ple in Amer­ica believe Sad­dam was con­nected with th attack. This is insne.

  109. Danny said on September 5th, 2008 at 12:55 am

    Thanks, Gas.

    Michael, the punch­line to that joke that I heard on the radio was because a story came out last week that the press had kept under wraps the story of John Edwards’ affair (and pos­si­ble child) with that woman for about six months. The Enquirer, paragon of truth that it is (not), had been report­ing the story for over a year, but no one else was report­ing anything.

    And I still have no idea what Alex’s post meant. Anyone?

    Jeff. Fire­fox users unite! Yes we can!

  110. moe99 said on September 5th, 2008 at 1:01 am

    Watched the first episode of Torch­wood after fix­ing din­ner for me and my daugh­ter, who came to visit. Much bet­ter use of my time than observ­ing the RNC

  111. Danny said on September 5th, 2008 at 1:03 am

    We were some­where around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold…

  112. nancy said on September 5th, 2008 at 1:09 am

    Liked the William Gib­son, Bas­set, but can’t quite say why. I loved his early stuff but we broke up some­where around “The Dif­fer­ence Engine.” “Spook Coun­try” was sup­posed to be a con­tin­u­a­tion of the pre­vi­ous book, but I didn’t miss the lack of background.

  113. Dexter said on September 5th, 2008 at 1:34 am

    So late to the party…my com­puter crashed after a power out­age and I had to go back to fac­tory set­tings and all that malarkey…I watched all these speeches ; Palin was despi­ca­ble with her sassy put-downs of Biden & Obama, and the cheers she got when she made her call for more tor­ture were hor­ri­ble, but we surely do know where the hearts of the repuggs lie.
    Cindy McCain had noth­ing of worth to com­ment on but she looked like a cross between Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe and Jen­nifer Granholm instead of a witch like she usu­ally resem­bles.
    McCain was try­ing to avoid men­tion­ing Bush but he did give Bush41 props. Hey McCain? Waste­ful spend­ing? How about ten bil­lion dol­lars a month down a rathole you support?

  114. caliban said on September 5th, 2008 at 5:11 am

    She’s affil­i­ated with the Assem­bly of God. She’s affil­i­ated with nut­cases con­nected to seces­sion­ist bas­tards thad think Tim McVeigh is a mar­tyr. She spoke at their con­ven­tion in this year. She ought to be on a no fly list because of her asso­ci­a­tions. Why isn’t she?

    No shit, she looks a whole lot more like Tonya Hard­ing than some ter­ris. I sppose.But who actu­ally looks like a ter­riss and how does that pro­tect anybody.

    I took a flight that waited for­ever, recently. It couldn’t be me. I’ve got blond hair and very blue eyes. My favorite thing about my own appear­ance is that my eyes are a near pur­ple blue that is a lot like Lix Taylor’s. Shouldn’t I have been a suspect?

    When these scur­rilous ass­holes mounted their assalt on the Cib­stu­tu­tion, they called it degend­ing the Honeland. I’be alwys thought they favored Stal­in­ism, buy its pretty amaz­ing they didn’t go straight for Vater­land. Aren’t you scared? Wow. The huns are t the door. Actu­ally, they’re in Pak­istan but the midget that declared mis­sion accom­plished with that sock stuffed in his­flight­suit said “I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care.” So why is the coun­try act­ing like bunch of pussies and cow­er­ing when these ass­holes manip­u­late the Terr rat­ing. Lip­stick Pit­bull is hold­ing down the Russ­ian front on the Berring Strait, so what is there to worry about”

    Morons vot­ing? Well, there’s that. Does it dawn on any­body the Repub­li­can speech­writ­ers added a sin­gle line to a speech they already wrote for Mitt? Or that this bim­bette trailer trash
    believes cre­ation­ism should be taught in schools, along with tellin teenagers just say no to sex. Any­body ever been a teenager? Even Mur­ri­cans are not that fuck­ing stu­pid. What were the books this idiot­thought should be remkoved from the Pub­lic Libraries?

    If John McCain is a war hero and a maver­icck, how;d he let Kerry take the heat on BCCI, Iran Con­tra. for which Repub­li­cans hated him so much per­son­ally they brought back ghosts of Nixon past to make up lies. Where was McCain then? He knew swigt­boat was pure bull­shit. He knew for a fact W went awol. Where was Mr. Straight Talk?

    McCain latched on toK­erry to pull his sorry ass out of the moral mor­rass of Keat­ing Five when he was in it up to his neck, for cash. The facr that this polit­i­cal phony just stood by and let Cheney and Rummy get away with every heinous act Kerry proved against then, and let Regan skate, mav­er­ick? Bo along to get along until you can put your tro­phy wife;s cash­into play, and bail on Kerry like HW bail­ing out of that bomber. Abd don’t stand by your pal that saved your ass­when the slime machine goes to work.

    Aside from any­thing else, how the hell did any­body buy that Jerome Corsi bull­shit about what Kerry did in Viet Nam, and, with no doubt, in Laos.Assholes went to the Repub­li­can Con­ven­tion with pur­ple bandaids.

    Were any of them ever there? No. A the­ory. These ass­holes so wanted to love the lit­tle pret­zeldent, they had to believe Kerry was fraud­u­lent. For pur­poses of their own belieg in their pindick man­hood, they had to believe this big guy didn’ per­form acts of hero­ism. Clearly, he did. He doesn’t seem proud and doesn’t like to talk about it.

    What W did: He went to Texas. He par­ited. Tjey were going to kick his ass out of Texas, so he webt to Alabama, where he never showed up. He col­lected a check and par­tied some more. Kerry ran a Swift River Boat. We was engaged in numeous fire­fights. In one of the fire­fights he pulled a mate to safety after charg­ing the enemy to pro­vide cover. This account is from the guy Kerry saved. Repub­li­cans say Kerry some­how staged this to win a Pur­ple eart so he could use it in 2004 to try to get elected Pres­i­dent. Repub­li­cans weren’t there. Guy Kerry saved was. Amer­i­cans believed Repub­li­cans that this was all staged. W served, Kerry didn’t

    What is wrong with Amer­i­can vot­ers? This is mind-boggling. Kerry could have been out of this but chode to go. W weaseled his way into guard­ing the Mex­i­can bor­der and the liqupr sup­ply at the OClub. Kerry could have done his time. So could W, I guess. Kerry took lives nd sved lives. W cranked and whined.

    Kerry decided the war was bull­shit. W decided this whole thing s bur­den and he could pary harder if they’d float his ass to Birm­ing­ham. Where he just blew off the guard, because the coke would pre­vent him from get­ting in a plane.

    Kerry had the brains to know the war was Nixon bull­shit, and he tossed the medals. He also decided he’d ry to make sure nobody else died for noth­ing. W Kept going to bats and get­ting coked up because he knew if some­body else was etting killed, at least it wasn’t h

    Twent years later, or so.

    Am elec­tion. And peo­ple sort of decide but the gix is most cer­tainly in in Cuya­hoga County. B;ackwell’s got tjhs nailed for seri­ous bucks

    So idiots think W is the war hero and some scum­bags makr it out like the real hero made it up.

    And peo­ple are fuck­ing idiodts

    It’s temp­tied to say “What fools these mor­tals be”.

    But given four years of hind­sight, and to this day I think the shitheels stole the elec­tion, and I’m sure Diebold is crim­i­nal in the actuality.

    But fuck. How does the so-called and self-proclaimed great­est nation in the world end up with Tonya Hard­ing run­ning for Vice Pres­i­dent abainst Joe Biden. We are sup­posed to for­get McCain is a whacko jerk devoid of prin­ci­ples. he wouldn’t shit­can at a momemts notice if it served his bizarre hunger. You see this asshhole’s face? Fee Fi Fo Fum. Ass­holes an ogre.

    What I really think about McCain. I live in South Car­olina. Back in 2000, I got push poll calls from the bushes about McCain’s ille­git­e­m­ate black kid. Kinda dis­turb­ing but Rove? Not human. But how in the world do you vote all of the time that is wrong on every issue, and suck up to him wheen he’s gone all Willie Hor­ton on you?

    All’s for­given? Maybe if you’ve got some over­ween­ing, obscene ambi­tion to com­mand the mil­i­a­try like your dad never did, McCain makes sense. This ahole wants to blow up the world ober Souyt Osset­tia. He’s nuts, amd a parox­ysm makes a bim­bette that believes Cre­atiu­nis­mand absti­nence should be taught in school as facts.

    These are not ratio­nal people.

  115. Connie said on September 5th, 2008 at 6:59 am

    Gib­son says he no longer writes sci­ence fic­tion, that tech­nol­ogy has changed the world so much since he began writ­ing, that now he con­sid­ers his work just plain fic­tion. Para­phrased from memory.

    No cita­tion, don’t remem­ber where I read it, bad librar­ian, bad!

    And did not get through his lat­est. Gave it up at the mid­way point.

  116. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 5th, 2008 at 7:19 am

    Left Gib­son for Tim Pow­ers, but i couldn’t get through his last one except by main force and mechan­i­cal page turn­ing. Great set-ups, mem­o­rable open­ings, but rushed, churn­ing endings.

    Richard Russo is the one liv­ing writer who has never dis­ap­pointed me (well, maybe a chap­ter here or there, more like a page or two), and the world must make a movie out of “Straight Man.” Ide­ally star­ring Alan Alda.

  117. Laura said on September 5th, 2008 at 8:47 am

    I’ve been try­ing to keep up here, and I have two ques­tions. First, where do you all find time to write these epic posts? It’s hard enough for me read them all (and occa­sion­ally write a few ill-formed sen­tences), let alone write thesis-sized retorts. Sec­ond, why all the vit­riol (and I’m talk­ing to both sides of the nnc debate)? I under­stand those who show pas­sion for their side, but I don’t get the cheap shots at all. I’m a big lefty and proud of it. But I don’t hate McCain. I find it sad that he’s made so many com­pro­mises w/the GOP and has found a VP who is not qual­i­fied. But name call­ing dimin­ishes the argu­ment. Let’s keep it cere­bral, folks.

  118. Laura said on September 5th, 2008 at 8:49 am

    By the way, my longest post ever (applause, please).

  119. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 5th, 2008 at 8:57 am

    What, Russo’s not cere­bral? ;-)

  120. brian stouder said on September 5th, 2008 at 9:26 am

    Laura — Bravo!

    clap­clap­clap­clap­clap­clap­clap­clap­clap

  121. Dorothy said on September 5th, 2008 at 9:28 am

    Laura beat me to it. She cap­tured much of what I was think­ing. It’s been bug­ging me since last night, read­ing so many of these com­ments that left me dis­turbed and just sort of sad. On the way to work this morn­ing I kept think­ing of the times we were all wor­ried about Danny and LAMary out on the West Coast with all the wild­fires. I know we can agree to dis­agree, but some­times the com­ments got out of line. Here’s hop­ing we can all keep level heads between now and Novem­ber 4th. And of course, there after, what­ever the elec­tion results.

  122. WhiteBeard said on September 5th, 2008 at 10:00 am

    I agree with Laura on a need for civil­ity. My Cana­dian vote does not count for much so I am try­ing to stay out of the polit­i­cal arena although the seces­sion­ist talk inter­ests me. I can remem­ber back when there was talk of the Upper Pen­nin­sula seced­ing from the United States until the then-bridge to nowhere (also known as the Mack­inac Bridge) was built.

  123. Scout said on September 5th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

    Jeff… I love Russo. Look! We agree on some­thing! :) A kum­baya moment.

  124. basset said on September 5th, 2008 at 8:57 pm

    “Dif­fer­ence Engine” was about where I started los­ing inter­est in Gib­son, too, and Bruce Ster­ling along with him. That whole Vic­to­rian trip that sci­ence fic­tion got into for awhile just doesn’t inter­est me.

    Worst exam­ple I’ve seen, though, of an author going from totally fas­ci­nat­ing to why-am-I-even-trying-to-read-this is Neal Stephen­son. “Snow Crash” was bloody bril­liant, “Necro­nom­i­con” or what­ever he called it I couldn’t get hold of at all. I got as far as the math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las, closed the cover, and didn’t go back… try­ing to deal with math has caused me enough pain and frus­tra­tion in real life that I just refuse to be around it in recre­ational reading.

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