Sunday Nights on the Lam: Columbus Day Edition

Technically, I'm pretty sure "Sunday night" actually means "the night when a weekend's worth of procrastination comes back to haunt you," which means that this installment of Sunday Nights on the Lam is actually perfectly punctual. But I think there are bigger things to worry about haunting us, because it appears that this week has seen several signs of the apocalypse. M.I.A. is pregnant, moose are appearing in various urban areas of northern Wisconsin (fleeing from Sarah Palin, no doubt), Barack Obama is advertising in a video game, and today I actually bought a suit without going into convulsions at the price tag. Clearly signs of our impending doom.

And if we will be judged on one thing, I firmly believe that it will be our long-standing failure to address a looming threat that we have ignored for far too long: namely, the threat of an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, attack against the United States. The never-ever-hysterical Heritage Foundation gives us the details:

An EMP attack is produced by detonating a nuclear weapon launched by a ballistic missile. Such a detonation—occurring high above the earth—produces a massive pulse of ionized particles that could damage many electrical and information systems. An attack would disrupt telecommunications, banking and finance, fuel and energy, food and water supplies, emergency and government services, and more, threatening millions of lives.

Fortunately, the nice folks at Heritage have the solution: Congress should declare an "EMP Recognition Day," drawing attention to the threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack by simulating its effects on Capitol Hill for a day. This would involve shutting down the cafeteria (no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for you, Herb Kohl!), walking to work, shutting off the lights, and - horror of horrors - shutting off Blackberries. (Perhaps John McCain could fly quickly walk in and invent a solution?) So the next time the markets are failing, Iraq is collapsing, and Congress is doing nothing, don't worry - it's not because they're negligent; it's because they're getting ready for the apocalypse in the form of an electromagnetic pulse. (Via Tapped.)

Oh, one more sign of the apocalypse: the Packers are back to .500 with yesterday's 27-17 win over Seattle. Aaron Rodgers, playing with an injured throwing shoulder, managed to throw for two touchdowns; Greg Jennings and Charles Woodson performed exceptionally. Here are the big plays:

Incidentally, next week H-COW (the Harvard College Club of Wisconsin, if you hadn't guessed) will be tailgating for the Colts game, so drop me a line if you want to join us. Bratwurst in Cambridge? Now I know the apocalypse has arrived.

Palin Campaign Clears Palin of Wrongdoing

I don't know about you, but I've certainly been waiting on tenterhooks for the forthcoming release of the Alaska legislature's report on Sarah Palin's alleged unethical behavior in the "Troopergate" scandal, in which she allegedly fired a police commissioner who refused to fire her ex-brother-in-law, or something like that. But fuzziness on the details is now acceptable, and I no longer intend to read the investigative report, because Sarah Palin has been cleared of any wrongdoing by the most authoritative and neutral source there is: her own campaign.

Trying to head off a potentially embarrassing state ethics report on GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, campaign officials released their own report Thursday that clears her of any wrongdoing.

Well, thank goodness THAT's been cleared up. Back to your regular moose-hunting, folks.

Update: Apparently some crazy pinko "Special Investigator" who claims to have been "appointed" by the "Alaska legislature" thinks he knows better.

Sunday Nights on the Lam: XXI Edition

OK. Before we get to the usual irreverent Sunday night stuff, a quick detour into the world of things that are actually awesome: the AFL-CIO's Rich Trumka tearing into racism in the labor movement, via Ta-Nehisi. So very well worth the 7:40.

I'm pretty sure I recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog every time I link to him, which I will do again today. Not only is he insightful and funny, he's also the most legitimate blogger I've seen use the term Mittens to describe Mitt Romney, which really makes me feel better about myself. Not so much for Frank Rich saying "OMG" - but that was pretty awesome, too.

While we're on the topic of badass people in the media: I already decided that Gwen Ifill was a badass on Wednesday, when it came out that she broke her ankle a few days before moderating the vice-presidential debate. (This automatically gives her way more badass points than J.Lo, who pulled out of judging the Project Runway finale on grounds of a "foot injury" - then proceeded to compete in a triathlon a couple of days later. Way to keep your priorities in order.)¹ Anyway - this discussion confirmed my suspicions. In my book, anyone who uses the phrase "blew me off" on Meet the Press is a winner.

Today was a pretty terrible day in sports for the state of Wisconsin (unlike last weekend, when the Pius Lady Popes - the only high school sports team that makes me wish I was Catholic - dominated a two-day volleyball tournament), so I'm going to replace the customary Packers clip with a really sweet catch in a presumably obscure Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference game: Edwin Baptiste for Morgan State. Here: Pretty damn awesome. Almost as awesome as Edwin Baptiste's official team photo.

That's all for tonight, folks - please take a moment of silence for the Packers and the Brewers if you get the chance, and think of me as I move us out of first place in the NFC North standings. But once you're done with that, have a fabulous week!

¹ If you're wondering how I found out about the J.Lo thing, it is not because I read Perez Hilton, which I do not, if that sentence was unclear in any way. Rather, it was Go Fug Yourself, which I highly recommend.

2008 Issue Briefing: Health Care

"Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."
-John McCain, in a September article about his health care plan

If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about why Barack Obama is better for the American health care system than John McCain, check out LegCom's 2008 Issue Briefing on Health Care.

Explaining Palin's success

Marianne sez:

So I was pretty sure that Sarah Palin did an exceptional job during the debate last night--an exceptional job at making sure that every question could be related back to the two topics that she knows anything about: taxes and energy.

Now we know how, via Sullivan:

Experience comes roaring back

Once upon a time, back when nobody knew that you could see Russia from Alaska, I suggested that the Palin pick would make it impossible for the GOP to talk about government experience as the salient factor differentiating John McCain from Barack Obama. Apparently there's an exception to the rule: Sarah Palin can talk about experience, but only to make Joe Biden look better than her.

Hat tip to Christian on this one.

Sunday Nights on the Lam: Second Season Premiere Edition

As you're all discovering, one can only make so many excuses about the many obligations imposed by Camp Harvard, the existential crises induced by shopping week, and the importance of being "caught up on reading" for that first precious section meeting before the really and truly important things come barging back to the top of your priority list. For me, that intruder is Sunday Nights on the Lam, and I am pleased to announce its return.

Of course, the hiatus does induce a certain laziness - which, for me, is reflected in the sad, sad state of my "Sunday night thoughts" file, which reads: "Random sporting moments?" So hell - let's roll with that.

I'm pretty sure that thought was jotted down during the Olympics in a rather distorted state of mind - distorted not only because I watched unhealthy amounts of TV, but also because I took to waking up at odd hours of the early morning to watch the obscure sports (badminton, table tennis) with my father, who tends to be enthusiastic about any sport in which the players for the American, Swedish, and Singaporean teams are all disproportionately likely to be Chinese. I am a big fan of the obscure sports, not only because I have a limited tolerance for Bob Costas telling me what Michael Phelps' mom ate for breakfast but also because it's pretty fun to watch them. I mean, badminton is pretty sweet. Look at this:

Don't tell me you could do that.

Nor should ping-pong be dismissed out of hand as a sport merely for the basement athlete:

Actually, I think that the real lesson of this video is that there are a lot of odd-sport fans who also have weird taste in music. While searching for videos of Lin Dan (the "bad boy of badminton," according to my dad, who should know), I found one fan who really likes the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for instance.

Sadly, I could find no clips of the hammer throw set to inspiring music, which is probably okay. I was turned on to the hammer throw by one very enthusiastic New York Times blogger, who I can only assume was posted to the Bird's Nest all day and decided that watching people run in circles was not his cup of tea. So instead this guy decided he'd watch the hammer throw, and I guess he fell in love:

Two days ago, when I went to watch the riveting Croatia-China handball match, I thought I had discovered my new favorite Olympic sport. I was wrong. It’s hammer throw. Seriously. I used to think hammer throw was what the koopa troopas in the Super Mario Bros. video games did (Kidding, kidding). I have found the error in my ways.

I think I can see his point. I mean, look at this:

They just pick up this thing that has no resemblance whatsoever to a hammer, and then they whirl around, and around, and around, and around, and then they scream like hell, and I guess the dudes in the suits probably try not to get hit, and somehow it's the Olympics. Isn't that amazing? But I guess if you're not that impressed, you could watch the Mario version. I guess that Times dude wasn't so far off.

There are so many obscure sports I'd love to talk about - team handball, synchronized swimming, trampoline - but it's about bedtime, so I'm going to leave you with my all-time favorite of ridiculous sports, especially when it's 3 AM and you totally weren't expecting it to come on the TV: the racewalk. Now, I don't mean to deny that racewalking is a legitimate sport that requires a tremendous degree of talent - I mean, these people walk faster than I run. But now that I've acknowledged that, I hope they'll acknowledge this: DAMN, racewalkers look silly. There are scientific reasons for this, I suppose, but that doesn't make the arm-pumping and hip-swiveling any less hilarious. Just look:

Damn.

That's all for tonight, folks - send over your obscure sports obsessions; I'll give them their proper due.

2008 Issue Briefing: Taxes and the Economy

We all know John McCain is out of touch personally - par for the course when you can't remember how many houses you own. But did you know McCain's economic policies are equally out of touch? Actually, you probably did - but we bet you haven't yet seen it presented in shiny PDF form. Well, now all of your dreams have come true!

The Harvard Dems Legislative Committee proudly presents the first in a series of weekly briefings on issues in the 2008 election. Download the fact sheet here.

Deregulating the consequences of deregulation

Markus has already said quite a bit about the financial bailout in the works, but one other thing should be pointed out (and already has been by many in the Bloggers With Paychecks world). Section 8 of the proposed legislation reads:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

I guess if it were 1:40 PM and not 1:40 AM, I might be able to come up with more commentary on this, but for now I think this will suffice: WTF NO.

THE SECRETS OF BEING SUPER-COOL REVEALED!!1!1!

I know Markus already dropped this reference, but just to get it out there: Our dear friends Mel and Garrett at Legion stumbled across the handbook of the Owl Club for Men, and have kindly made it available for your perusal. Never punched? Not a dude? Go see what you're missing.

Ever wonder why the GOP is so disproportionately white?

Well, now you know: they pick people like George Allen to headline their minority outreach efforts.

Yet more fodder for a longstanding debate I've been having with myself: Is it that they think we're stupid, or is it that they're colossally stupid? My money's on both.

Wisconsin and the voter fraud myth

(I was originally going to find something else to say about Sarah Palin, but variety is the spice of life, hey?)

Via my mother, some troubling news from my home state: J.B. Van Hollen, Wisconsin's attorney general and the possessor of a car-dealer name if I ever saw one, has filed suit to force the state's Government Accountability Board to review the legality of every voter registration card filed by mail or through a registration drive between 2006 and last month. In practice, this means that local election clerks would have to check over 240,000 voter registration records against a state database of drivers' licenses, criminal records, and other information.

I'm calling bullshit. This is the same old attempt to scare up fears of voter fraud that we've been hearing from Republicans since at least 2002. Yet in five years of investigation of the alleged conspiracy to swing close elections through massive voter fraud, the Justice Department turned up a grand total of 120 indictments and 86 convictions by 2005. The GOP was particularly interested in Milwaukee as a locus of potential fraud in the 2004 presidential election, but after a lengthy investigation, Steven Biskupic, the U.S. Attorney for Milwaukee, concluded, "We don't see a massive conspiracy to alter the election in Milwaukee." This is true even if your definition of "massive" is particularly generous: Biskupic, a Republican appointee, prosecuted fourteen fraud cases and won five of them. Now, Van Hollen - who just so happens to be the co-chair of John McCain's Wisconsin campaign - is trying the same crap again, with a suit that just so happens to disproportionately affect voters who live in heavily democratic, majority-minority Milwaukee.

Now, the disclaimers. Having voted in Milwaukee and observed our electoral system in action, I will certainly not claim that we're perfect, or even close. The state's voter record confirmation database faced glitches that kept it out of action well past the federal deadline. Milwaukee's election commission faces impressive backlogs. Most poll workers are poorly trained - so much that one poll worker allowed a felon to register to vote on election day, even though he presented his prison ID card to verify his identity. And over the summer, both ACORN and the Community Voters Project turned in a few employees in their own voter-registration drives for filing made-up cards. Yes, Wisconsin's election system has some big problems, and Van Hollen, as the attorney general, certainly has a role to play in rectifying them.

But Van Hollen's lawsuit is hardly going to help those problems, and not just because it's logistically impossible to check 240,000 voter records before November 4. The Help America Vote Act, which calls for the records checks he wants, is completely ambiguous about what happens when an election clerk finds a mismatch between the database and the voter registration records. Van Hollen acknowledges this:

Asked Wednesday if he was seeking to remove people from the voter rolls if their data did not match, Van Hollen said: “We’re not addressing that at all. The law is not clear and leaves some discretion within the Government Accountability Board as to how they enforce (the law) and how they make sure the voter rolls are accurate based upon the checks.”

In fact, the Journal Sentinel reports that voters with a records mismatch, even if they don't respond to the election clerk's request to correct their records, will remain eligible to vote - so if the checks were to magically uncover a widespread voter fraud conspiracy, they still wouldn't fix the problem.

There's a simple reason why this policy of not automatically removing voters from the rolls makes sense: because the vast majority of mismatches don't result from fraud; they result from simple data entry errors. If I register to vote as part of a registration drive, and the election officials can't read my terrible handwriting and enter my birth date incorrectly, I'll come up as a mismatch. If J.B. Van Hollen is registered to vote as J.B., but his driver's license lists his name as John Byron Van Hollen, he'll come up as a mismatch. In fact, all but two members of the Government Accountability Board, which would be charged with implementing Van Hollen's request, have records mismatches because of typographical errors or name variations. In short, Van Hollen is going after a problem that's hardly big enough to tip the election one way or another, in a fashion that will result in no actual change.

A tip for all you aspiring state attorneys-general out there: if you're really committed to eliminating voter fraud, maybe you should start by professionalizing the poll workers, streamlining records checks, or educating people about registration and eligibility - and maybe do it more than three months before the election.

A particularly unacceptable Palin myth

I have an awful lot to say about Sarah Palin. (In fact, I had started to say an awful lot of it before my ridiculously buggy home computer crashed. Thanks, Windows.) It'll get out here sometime. But here's an opinion I can no longer hold in: TINA FEY IS HOTTER THAN SARAH PALIN. STOP MAKING THE ANALOGY.

There, I feel much better.

McCain picks Sarah Palin

The VP pick: Sarah Palin, a first-term governor of Alaska.

I'm interested in your thoughts, but here are a couple of mine.

There are a number of advantages to the pick, but a lot of them seem short-term. From a media perspective, this certainly caught both the press and the Obama campaign - Palin flew under the radar and the campaign, as far as I can tell, hasn't yet issued a reaction. The pick was surprising enough that it will push aside a lot of the coverage of Obama's speech at the convention last night. Picking a woman, and a governor who came to office partly on her promises that she would clean up Alaska's notoriously scandal-ridden political system, gives a much-needed shot in the arm to McCain's maverick reputation, given that the Democrats have spent the past four days assailing Big Mac as a continuation of the Bush administration. Picking a candidate who's relatively unknown offers the McCain campaign the chance to control the narrative about Palin, while the Obama campaign is still looking for a response.

But I think most of these advantages will fade out well before the election. No matter how well the GOP constructs the narrative surrounding Palin, I don't think there's anything in her record that even suggests foreign policy experience - meaning that McCain's key argument that Obama lacks the experience to be commander-in-chief applies doubly to Palin. I don't think McCain and Palin have ever really worked together, unless I'm missing something, which means that aside from enemies, nobody really knows yet if they have anything in common. If the chemistry works out, it could help balance out McCain's image, but if it doesn't, she could just make him look old and awkward - a crapshoot there. And although women may be excited in the short term, it would be a gross underestimation of Hillary Clinton's supporters to assume that identity politics alone could pull them over to the Republican side. While there was tremendous enthusiasm among quite a few women (and not a few men!) about the possibility of electing the first female president, that enthusiasm was rooted in the fact that Hillary had a strong record on women's issues. That enthusiasm, among the vast majority of Hillary supporters that I know, was hardly so shallow as to be transferable to the next woman who comes along. Instead McCain is dealing with a political unknown who undercuts the biggest argument he can make against Barack Obama.

Oh, and apparently her learning curve would be pretty steep.

Your thoughts?

Del Martin, 1921-2008

Del Martin, a trailblazing lesbian rights activist, died yesterday at 87. She and Phyllis Lyon, her partner of fifty-five years, were the first same-sex couple to be married in California not once but twice - first in 2004, when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom briefly legalized gay marriage, and then in 2008, after a California Supreme Court ruling affirmed the right to same-sex marriage. Del and Phyllis were and are a source of hope for those of us who have despaired, at one point or another, that things would never get better for LGBT people, and their commitment to each other serves as a powerful rebuke to those who would have us believe that same-sex love is in any way inferior. Some of her first published words offer a motto to live by: "Nothing was ever accomplished by hiding in a dark corner." So cheers to you, Del Martin, and may your memory continue to inspire us all to come out of our corners and carry on the fight you started.