Desperation Roundup

Earlier than I predicted, Sarah Palin re-introduces Rev Wright in the discussion. Again, let's review the logic of this talking point. Rev Wright says blacks have been treated unfairly, therefore he is a racist. Shut up, you racist! Stop talking! You racists should know your place.

Warner Todd Huston goes for the Nazi analogy: Obama Nazi Youth Corps Leader/Teacher Suspended! Even the Fox News story he sources doesn't come right out and SAY Nazi; they're holding on to that one until after the 15th. And again, a helpful reminder... the Nazis and the Klan don't LIKE black people.

The makers of right wing comedy AN AMERICAN CAROL strike out against the vast liberal conspiracy of theatre owners:

Please check your ticket. If you were in fact one of those people that were "mistakenly" sold a ticket for another movie please fill out the form below. Hold on to your ticket so we can have proof.

If you have noticed other irregularities with the theatres in your area please let us know in the comment section below. For instance, Rated R film rating (when in fact we are rated PG-13), posters not being up, not being listed on the marquee, image or focus problems, sound issues, etc.

Oh come on. Crappy presentation is not liberal bias. In fact, if you assume Hollywood has a liberal bias, then crappy presentation is proof that exhibitors are conservative. Because it's everywhere. And a bunch of ticket stubs without American Carol on the title just means that PACs across the nation are spending too much time in theatre dumpsters. I demand any ticket soaked in butter flavoring or soda be thrown out of the polling.

Seriously Not Racist, This Time

Wonkette is usually a reliable source of snark, which is why it pains me to see this headline today.

PALIN RILES UP RACIST CROWD TO KILL OBAMA

Don't get me wrong - the post alludes to a Washington Post piece in which they describe a rally in Florida where Sarah Palin does say terrible, unsubstantiated things about Obama and his relationship to the former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers. And a guy in the audience does yell "Kill him!" But the DNC talking point that says linking Obama and Ayers, implying that Obama is a terrorist, is "racist" is simply unfair.

This is another instance of calling Republicans a racist because they despise a man who happens to be black. He may be, but he's also a Democrat and that's all the reason that Republicans need to despise him. They hated Kerry similarly. They think Nancy Pelosi is a demon. They dragged a grieving widow, Cindy Sheehan, through the mud for years and she's not black.

Ayers is an old-school WHITE former terrorist.

And don't get me wrong, the real racism is coming. There's going to be a point at which the poll numbers are low enough and the options are limited enough that racism will trump their fear of backlash. But at a national level they tend to hold off on that kind of thing until much closer to election day. Racist campaigning is just bad strategy if you time it wrong. Look for the Rev Wright to return to the political pundit reference list in late October. Linking Obama to an angry BLACK man, that's racist.

I still stand my judgement of that video from last week though, because it was produced by newcomers. College kids always think they're the first to try something, when in fact they just don't know the difference between a new idea and a stupid one. While I'm at it, I gotta say I have no idea how big that particular video was. I predicted it would spread like wildfire, and the meme that they're registering people in a shady way is circulating, but I don't know it that particular piece is taking off. So maybe I was wrong? Anyone got some metrics for me?

There's Big Money in Politics

(H/T to me: crossposted from box office weekly)

The Hollywood Reporter scooped me this morning. I was thinking of writing a commentary about the surprising amount of interest in the presidential election, and here comes James Hibbard in his LIVE FEED blog. He opens:

Have Nielsen ratings ever been so politicized?

-- Barack Obama received record-breaking viewers for his Democratic National Convention speech.

-- John McCain's convention speech shocked pundits by matching Obama.

-- The first Obama-McCain debate received a surprisingly non-historic viewership.

-- Yet the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden drew a blowout audience, the most watched vp debate ever.

Even I watched the VP debate, and I also watched the SNL satire of the event a few nights later. And indeed, SNL is garnering their best ratings in years, having hitched their wagon to the blazing satire-friendly star of Sarah Palin. I gotta also say, they did a wicked Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi. SNL seems to be taking the honorable path for satirists and lobbing volleys in all directions. Welcome back Lorne. All is forgiven.

There's no need to take sides in analyzing this trend. People just seem to really want to watch stuff about politics. They want to watch the debates and they want to see what the pundits think afterwards. They'd rather watch politics than hour-long dramatics, or even more conventional reality shows. It's like America's Top Model, only when the season finale happens your life will actually be affected by which model wins. Hopefully.

So great, TV has found something else to put commercials around. Unfortunately, the Presidential election has a definite cutoff date. There's money to be made out of this thing until early November, then like the Olympics, the cash cow disappears and you're left with a bunch of pundits who have to go back to making issues out of nothing.

Forgive me for putting this idea out there, but someone is going to and it might as well be yours truly. Elections are good for ratings, most local governments are going to be strapped for cash in the next few years... would it kill us to have a sponsored Mayoral campaign somewhere? That is, would it kill democracy? Yeah, probably. But like I say, it's inevitable. Ideally, Endemol or some other reality show outfit would swoop in early on, drop equal seed money on two candidates somewhere in exchange for total access to the campaigns. Then they could cut the footage together into an hour a week of Survivor-like goodness.

It sounds a little distasteful, but it's not outside the envelope of reality shows OR politics; the only new element is the combination. Look at it this way - it's just like a documentary but with frequent commercial breaks and cheesier music. Sadly, there are only so many of these shows you can have on the air at one time and there are lots of mayoral races.

And for the CW (let's assume it will be them first) it means an hour of TV that costs a LOT less than an episode of SMALLVILLE. As far as casting goes, they'd probably pick a race where the candidates are younger and more telegenic than usual, but you don't need a reality show to force THAT issue. Again, it's inevitable. Why not make a little cash off it?

Once this goes on the air, I won't watch it. I'm already getting my political entertainment off the blogs. But you might. And when you do, someone is waiting in the wings to sell you soap, cars and pharmacology. And remember, whatever they spend on advertising is a dollar less they're giving to lobbyists.

A Startling Palin Insight

Remember the debate Thursday night? Fairly early in the evening, Palin said this to Biden:

...And I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also.

It seemed kind of refreshing, an admission that there is very little actual debate in these things. But today in my Voice Acting class I got a hold of a script with the following notation:

Mild Southern accent, IF that's who you are. DO NOT READ THE ITALICIZED DESCRIPTIONS.

And that's when it hit me - Sarah thought she was delivering a talking point, but she was delivering the instructions instead! They've been drilling her, baby, drilling, for weeks now and it all sunk in, even the parts when they said, "And don't forget, you don't have to answer the questions they ask you. And for God's sake, don't talk to Biden or Ifill. Talk straight to the American people. And let them know your track record!" I'm not saying she is too stupid to know the difference, I'm saying it slipped out under pressure. 

I bet they also told her to go ahead and flirt with the camera a little.

The Audacity of Cardboard Cutouts

Voter registration table, Topanga Mall, Woodland Hills.  You know what else? You can't see my hand, but I'm givin' him money!

Oh Yeah, The Bailout

Investment!

Alls I can say is that slippery slope arguments are, by their nature, fear-based. And the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Celebrity Endorsement for Palin!

h/t Wonkette

Schwarzenegger Considers Bailout Request

Hey, it's a last resort - we've spent months trying to convince Ken Lay's family to give us the money back, and they won't budge.

But Enough About Me.

As I said, I think Sarah Palin won the debate last night. I'd leave it at that, but since I've lost all my conservative readers I don't feel the need to shelter their hypersensitivities any more. And some people are a little more concerned with substance than I am.

Sean at FIVETHIRTYEIGHT.COM liveblogged: It seems the meta thru-line of Governor Palin's performance tonight is that we need change from the folks who've been in Washington for a long time. That can't be a good thematic element. (Arguably, Biden said the same, but he didn't keep hammering it home so much, which means it's harder to pin on him.)

Courtesy THINK PROGRESS: On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan is quite vehemently insisting that Palin “wiped the floor” with Joe Biden whom he described as “boring.” Rachel Maddow tried to press Buchanan on whether Palin’s various factual errors were relevant, but Buchanan dismissed these concerns as “picayune.” This is important. I think most people who say Palin came out ahead last night are basing the judgement on the same likability criteria. If that matters. But again from fivethirtyeight maybe people aren't as shallow as they used to be: Biden won the CBS poll of undecideds 46-21, and the CNN poll of debate watchers 51-36. Independents in the large MediaCurves focus group panel went for Biden about 2:1.

Also from TP - 9:44: Palin just said that the plan that Obama, Maliki, and President Bush currently supports is “a white flag of surrender.”

ABC News pointed out that Palin's assertion that we are back down to pre-surge troop levels is incorrect. Iraq troop levels before the surge were at 133,500. While U.S. troop levels in Iraq have been in the 142,000 range recently, today they are at around 150,000 because of an ongoing troop rotation.

Also, Palin seems totally behind the Dick Cheney idea that the Vice President's office is some super-legislative entitity that runs all branches of government. I'm more traditional on this one: it's a limited role until the President either dies from a heart attack or is killed by panicked white supremacists. God Forbid in either case.

By the way, is it my imagination or was Sarah smiling a little too broadly when she addressed that subject?

The Weirdest Debate Analysis

"She had that folksy thing down—although I did notice, watching the squiggly lines down at the bottom of the CNN screen, that when she tried to get cutesy with her folksiness, it didn't work."

-Joe Klein, Time.com. "Cutesy with her folksiness?" WTF?

But totally true.

The Debate Was Disappointing

I was hoping for much, much worse from both candidates. Sadly, they both acquitted themselves admirably. In fact, on the whole I think I connected more with Palin. 

There was the usual tiresome hewing to talking points and very little was actually said that mattered. Both sides spent too much time accusing the other of things. But discounting the verbals slips and gaffes, that is, making allowances for unrehearsed sentence formation, either one seemed like a credible Vice President.

One is indebted to SNL for a Palin sketch they did last week, where they pointed out that when she's cornered she really turns on the adorable. I find this a worrisome tendency if she conducts day-to-day business that way. And it raised the hackles on the back of my neck when she tried to shut down mention of the Bush administration with gentle chiding... especially since she did so much of it herself. 

The PBS commentators are right... by not losing, Sarah Palin won the debate.

Oh, I almost forgot - can't wait to see the analysis tomorrow about whether Ifill's far-left bias was a factor. 

New Tricks

If you take this month's issue of NATURE magazine and lay it flat on the table, you get this:

Could be coincidence, could be the liberal media. I just think it's adorable.

De Bate! Dee Bate!

Tonight is the big VP debate, between Palin and Biden. It doesn't matter. It shouldn't matter. And yet I'm probably going to watch, not because it will influence my vote and not even because I could pick up a few talking points. I'm going to watch out of pure, white-hot schaudenfreude.

I'd predict that the affair will be a train wreck, but since there was a real train wreck right near me last month I'm trying to avoid that metaphor.

So what are the fun things to look for tonight in the contest between the woman who is afraid to speak and the man who can't shut up? You could enjoy a drinking game. One commenter suggests-

Palin: Reform

Biden: Look

- although Ana Marie Cox wants to take a shot any time Palin says "you know" which means she should be out within 12 minutes.

Then there is the Gwen Ifill controversey. You can look at it as a legitimate concern about bias or as an attempt to make excuses in advance, but the blogosphere is raising issues about Ifill's upcoming book, which is about African-American political figures. My conclusion? Ifill is totally in the tank for Colin Powell. (Hey, maybe she'll throw out a question about the "Powell Doctrine!" Fun!) The drive to get Ifill replaced with someone unbiased like (seriously) Britt Hume is counterproductive. For one thing, it reinforces the idea that Palin isn't ready; for another, both candidates have been training for weeks with a Gwen Ifill stand-in. Palin litererally wouldn't be ready.

By the way, McCain was okay with the Ifill choice yesterday, and a little queasy about it this morning.

Biden could roll with it - if you want to talk about lowered expectations, nobody is really watching the debate to see Biden say something stupid. It would be like watching the sun to see if it sets in the east. And no matter who is asking the questions, he has years of experience delivering non-answers to them.

In fact, this last point is why the debate (all debates, actually) will untimately be so squirm-inducing. No politician is stupid enough to answer a question honestly, and the best ones are so smart that they can answer a question while literally saying nothing. So tonight ingore substance. Won't be none! Watch to see who appears more nervous. The other one wins.

Mea Culpa: Careful What You Wish For

So earlier I was complaining that I don't get enough death threats. I still don't, but I did earn the ire of half my readership.

When I reposted this video from Where Are My Keys?, he took it to mean I was directly calling him a racist. I want to apologize for this, but the way I'm going to do it probably won't mend any fences. I gotta make the distinction between conscious and unconscious racism here. Very few people are conscious racists. Lewis Farakkhan, David Dukes, the Taliban; they actively believe that members of another race must be stopped and are actively campaigning for it. Almost everyone else, including me, is unconsciously racist. Rationally we know that all people are created equal, but when presented with someone who looks or acts different enough we react with aversion, or fear.

The video is a case in point. The people who made it chose to concentrate entirely on black homeless people, even though you could see some homeless white folk in the background. Why did they find the black subjects more compelling? Unconscious racism. Why is the video spreading now? (I hear Drudge is having trouble keeping up with the demand) *

I'll say it now, the black element isn't the only reason people would spread this video. I'm a little queasy about the idea of registering homeless winos to vote too. And I'd rather the wino vote was spread a little more evenly across party lines. And while the founding fathers preferred that the electorate was educated and engaged, it's a guideline and not a law. (Also, no one is following these guys into the booth. Nothing is stopping them from grabbing their ride and free pizza rolls and then voting for Ron Paul.)

But if the video had made these points using more white folk and less black folk, I bet it wouldn't be as viral as it is. And I bet almost nobody is consciously  thinking "all black people are homeless" or "all black people vote for Obama" or "If Obama wins he'll only help the blacks." But on some level, in the back of our brains, as a sub-routine, it's running. And that's why this will be bigger than the Dan Rather letter without even trying.

Couple of hundred years of evolution may finally put a stop to it, but it ain't happening this month.

So MD and GWK, I'm sorry you took away from the post what you did. The only consolation I can offer you is I'm insulting myself along with ya, so we should ALL hate me.

Hey, since I'm attempting an apology, could you at least consider me a gracious asshole? It'd mean the world to me.

* No I don't. Drudge can't keep up with the demand for this.  Its authenticity is not established.

More Non-Racism: Now It's Going To Get Interesting

The chips are down for the Republicans (look at the poll numbers!)... I'll be very interested to see how much play the above video gets, around the right-wing blogosphere. Because you know, the issue is that they're registering the uninformed to vote. 

(H/T Where Are My Keys, but as Billy Ray Cyrus said, "It won't be the last")

Definitely A Battleground Area

H/T Wonkette!

From Spencer in the Wonkette comments section: First off none of these people can hear. They probably thought he was asking, “Who wants more pain?” and only the guy who is secretly into S&M raises his hand before his embarrassed wife puts his hand down. Then the reporter asked, “Who loves their mama?” and of course everyone raised their hand because, after all, who doesn’t?

I Feel Left Out

This little blog barely matters. You know how I can tell? I don't get THIS kind of hate mail.

It's a fact of life on the internet that when you are mentioned (and linked to) unfavorably by certain high traffic right-wing bloggers, you promptly start receiving some of the most remarkable hate mail you've ever seen. It begins immediately, peaks overnight, and continues usually for about 72 hours or so. Then everyone forgets about it or gets bored and only a few wackos send you the odd death threat for another week or two. (That cycle of mass hatred is not exclusive to pissing off the far-right—obsessive fans of certain celebrities act in much the same fashion!—but Malkin-readers are the form's purest expression.) For your edification, we've run some numbers on keywords used in the hate mail sent to us after we reprinted some of Sarah Palin's emails, an act of malicious terrorism that got us called all sorts of names by Michelle Malkin, Bill O'Reilley, and presumably many more.

Without quoting the mail itself, let me quote a paragraph from Kathleen Parker, a conservative columnist who expressed an opinion that maaaaaaaaaybe Sarah Palin might consider stepping down after a few disasterous interviews.

The picture is this: Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn't sound American to me, but Stalin would approve. Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different than one's own, then we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

And she's on THEIR SIDE!

Gawker's opinion is this: Liberals get a great deal of justified ribbing for their constant outrage over every little thing, and political blog commenters from both sides are guilty of disgusting rhetoric, but in our experience it's the Malkinites and Little Green Footballers and their Brethren who hands-down win the violent, stupid, and hateful hat trick. Which has been my observation too.

100 Percent Absolute Truth

In another clip, when McCain is asked how he can restore trust in American government if some of his campaign charges are not completely true, he doesn't hide his displeasure with the question.

"Because I have always had 100 percent, absolute truth and that's been my life of putting my country first," McCain replied. "And i'll match that record against anyone's. And I'm proud of it. And an assertion that I've ever done otherwise, I take strong exception to."

Johnathan Martin in Politico

It's hard not to read a statement like that as "help! I'm drowning!" He also said this morning on NPR that he's asked Sarah Palin for foreign policy advice "many times in the past." The past going all the way back to late August? Does he know so little about foreign policy that he is turning to Sarah Palin for advice? Questions, questions.

My favorite questions concerning the first interview, with editors of the Des Moines Register, come from Mike Murphy at Swampland. A former campaign strategist for the GOP, he asked:

What the Hell was McCain even doing there in the first place?

1.) Obama is going to win Iowa.

2.) Editorial board meetings are usually pure trouble to begin with and result only in newspaper endorsements that persuade very few voters beyond the immediate family members of the editorial board.

3.) Within the rarified category of newspaper editorial boards, the Des Moines Register is one of the most liberal in the country. I'm rather surprised that halfway through the McCain interview they failed to switch over to Esperanto, the peace-loving language of all nations.

You know, William Shatner starred in the only movie made entirely in Esperanto. It's off the subject but fascinating.

***Update*** See comments for more about the Language of peace and brotherhood, including an important correction.

Never Answer a Hypothetical

Say you're conservative. It's 2012 and the primaries have narrowed down to two candidates: Sarah Palin and Condoleeza Rice. Who gets your vote?

Speaking Of Leadership

John McCain's latest campaign ad, running in key states.

"Wall Street Squanders our money. And Washington is forced to bail them out with -- you guessed it -- our money. Can it get any worse?" asks the ad's narrator, as the words "BAILOUT WITH OUR MONEY" cross the screen.

The ad blames Obama for the plan that congress passed yesterday. Two problems - it didn't pass (the ad was sent out before it went down in horrific flames) and McCain has been taking credit all week for the plan and its success. I'll cut him some slack for the first thing but the second, that's just weird.

McCain lead America? He's not even talkin' to his own campaign.