I Thought This Day Would Never Come

Actually, before I get to the reason for this post, I first want to point out that Bill Richardson totally has a Strike Beard going on:

Image from here.

OK, now to the main attraction:
On Fox News this morning, Chris Wallace actually called out his colleagues for being unfair to Barack Obama!

Someone get Satan some mittens; he must be freezing right now.

Also, this gives me a chance to post last year's most entertaining 5 minutes of television (the fireworks start about 2:15 in):

Fox "News" Boycott

What does everyone thing of '08 candidates Clinton, Edwards and Obama's decisions not to participate in a debate on Fox News, which they are justifying by saying that there's simply no point, given the obscene biases of the channel?

On the one hand, I think it's a bit childish, and only adds fuel to Fox's fire. Biased or not, Fox is still one of America's primary news sources, and Democrats aren't winning any swing votes by cutting them out.

But on the other hand, now that nutjob Michelle Malkin is on the airwaves, I think they have a point. Watch this priceless exchange between the pundit and the General Counsel of the Black Panther Party (Malkin quips: "how many members do you have sir? Fifteen?" What grade is she in?), They proceed to call one another whores, and the segment ends with Malkin's sarcastic "uh huh, okay, bye now.. buh-bye..." She then moves into reporter mode.. "now onto reports..."

That's fair and balanced.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9vadcdgzjI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwonkette%2Ecom%2F%3FrefId%3D252555

Roundup -- So Close And Yet So Far

About this time in April at Harvard everything comes to a head. It dawns on you, and your TFs, that we have what -- five, six weeks left of classes? Holy shit. Crunch time. You expect the next 20 days or so to just rocket by in a barrage of papers and problem sets and Student Group Activities and housing lotteries and PANIC! But of course, time never goes slower than when you have lots of unpleasant crap to do, and you'll still spend what feels like most of the day watching asinine YouTube videos and weeping softly into your keyboard. The end result being, from now until reading period will feel like longer than the rest of the year combined. Hooray for college! Now look at this:

My favorite graph of all time. (Professor Pollkatz puts it together.) I love to show it to haters who claim that public opinion surveys are arbitrary or inaccurate -- TRY and tell me there's no science to that trend.

But the real insight here: look closely. The only periods post-9/11 where Bush approval has increased or levelled (other than the spikes for the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam) were July-December 2002, June-December 2004, and June-October 2006, all of which contained intense electoral campaigning which put the GOP in a better light. (Clearly, by the end of the 06 cycle, Dem messaging had got through and negated that effect.) At all other times, Bush's approval has been constantly declining at a remarkably consistent rate, and it continues to today. Logically, then, one should not necessarily assume it's going to bottom out. We could potentially see a decline even further, below Nixon territory and into uncharted waters, within the next few months. Hypothetically: impeachment could be on the table, and more importantly it could be widely popular.

Anyway. Why dwell on the "public" and its silly "opinions"? We have more pressing roundup matters to attend to! Like:

--STUPID BULLSHIT! Yes, the White House claims that it has magically "lost" a jillion emails that might pertain to the fired attorneys, presumably while the I.T. guys were waxing out the Intertubes. Every commenter on Daily Kos immediately pointed out how patently ridiculous this is; even Patrick Leahy had the sense to describe it as a "dog ate my homework" excuse. (DKos's Kagro X went on to suggest that we start calling this scandal "DogAte." You know, like Watergate and Travelgate, except cleverer. Truly we live in the end times.) Up next: Alberto Gonzales gets "stuck in traffic" on the way to his Senate committee deposition and is never heard from again.

--On a happier note: warm welcome to Endria Richardson, making her blogdebut at Cambridge Common with some cool poetry. Looking forward to more!

--Read David Sirota on the so-called "labor shortage," which he argues is a fiction produced by business interests trying to justify outsourcing and keep costs under control -- meanwhile wages here continue to stagnate (and let's not even get into the ugly truth about disposable income and purchasing power). Our economy is in deep shit. (But hey, did you hear? That American Idol guy survived another round! BIG NEWS!)

--An unwitting RedState writer sums up the mentality of the entire conservative intellectual movement. Special treat for Garrett:

I was listening to the re-run of an obvious spinster-to-be named Jenny Ballantine on Rush Limbaugh's radio show as she was kvetching and whining in New Hampshire in front of the Edwards "Couple" and I thought of that flag with the snake that said "Don't Tread on Me." It's still on the license plate, if I'm not mistaken.

Whatever happened to the rock-ribbed New Englanders that Norman Rockwell immortalized back in the day when Life Magazine and Saturday Evening Post covers portrayed a different reality, one of a nation that worked out its difficulties through grit and gumption?

Yup. That'll solve our problems: grit and gumption. And we'll all wear an onion on our belt, 'cause it's the style at the time. Prohibition forever!

--Speaking of the olden days, Phyllis Schlafly is still alive and still writing op-eds about those darn feminists. Who'd have guessed?

--Have you been following the Michael Godelia story? Me neither. But kudos to Kameron Collins for handling it with such class. He's done the Harvard community a service.

--Mystery Pollster has a great look at some recent FOX polls that are insanely, ridiculously biased. We call them a "news" organization why?

--Best look yet at the New Populism, and how John Edwards fits into it. If I say it enough times maybe you guys will listen: this is how we win. "Edwards is a one-man 50-state strategy."

--If you'd like to be really disturbed, watch this British documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church (those people who protest soldiers' funerals). It's like a car accident, you can't tear your eyes away.

--MyDD's Matt Stoller, who has been strange and off-kilter lately, suddenly shouts out a wonderful and impassioned articulation of everything the New "Netroots" Left (or whatever we're called) stands for. Read it.

--Random Wikipedia Curiosity: "Erdős–Bacon number." Mathematicians apparently have lots of time on their hands.

--Band Madness's 4th round ends at 4:00, and Neil Young needs our help. He's down 400-some votes to Guns 'n' Roses. This cannot stand (I mean, "Sweet Child of Mine" is classic, but come on.) We can do it, liberals!

..AND that's all I got, save a closer; of all the tributes I've seen for the late Kurt Vonnegut -- who was one of my heroes, literary and otherwise -- James Wolcott's somehow seems to be the most appropriate.

But I can't say the atmosphere was any cheerier when I left. I was escorted down a corridor, a door opened, and standing there, waiting to enter, was Kurt Vonnegut, looking rumpled, baffled, and tired after his long inward journey through life. It was such a startling apparition--I had no idea Vonnegut had been booked and was taping immediately after me--that I couldn't even rustle up a hello, not that he seemed to notice. He was there to do his television duty, no more, no less. The look on his face so matched the mood in the studio that additional comment seemed superfluous. I wonder what he and Cavett chatted about during the commercial breaks, or if in lieu of small talk they sank into separate compartments of silence as the crew made busy little adjustments to the lights, sound levels, camera angles. It was all so long ago, sometime during the Age of Chivalry. Anyway, that's my non story about not meeting Kurt Vonnegut.

So it goes. This is an open thread.

Roundup -- Coming Up For Air

GodDAMN, there's nothing more frustrating than spending days finding nuggets of promising blogmaterial, but having to let them slide because you feel guilty about not writing your fifteen-page gov paper--
         (Question for anyone taking sophomore gov tutorial: WTF?!?)
--which you naturally put off until the last minute anyway, instead spending a solid 30 minutes playing WWE SmackDown! Vs. Raw 2006 on your roommate's Xbox, and wind up incoherently flailing at your keyboard about "revolutionary assessments of power vacuums" at 4 AM on a Tuesday while plotting transfer to the U of Western Ontario where you won't have to deal with this shit.

Point being, I'm still a little loopy, but here's a random collection of links to entertain you anyway...

--Scooter Libby: fall guy. Fitzgerald: finished. FOX News: still fair and balanced.

--Crimson Blues, the HLS Dems blog, continues to impress: writer Ehren J. Brav gives a great examination of whether the government's accounting of the budget deficit may be misleading. Check it out.

--The Washington Post has an important story, this from the CCES study of election returns:

The visual representation of the nation's voters isn't a nicely shaped bell, with most voters in the moderate middle. It's a sharp V.

The nation is polarized, and the hallowed "middle ground" is largely nonexistent. Where's your "triangulation" now?

--Congrats to Justin, Jarret, and all of LegCom, who got their op-ed published in the Crimson. It's top-notch. Also, Jess Coggins (why does that name sound familiar?) responds at Cambridge Common.

--Beyond the Ann Coulter unpleasantness, CPAC might contain some lessons for us about the state of modern conservatism. The best summaries have come from alien & sedition, an obscure but fantastic blog dedicated to analyzing the conservative movement. This one deserves to be on your must-read list. (Also, Stephen discusses his CPAC experiences at RedIvy.)

--Breaking from politics for a moment: Uleaileuleaileaeuleaileae!

--Speaking of incoherent babble, Joe Klein's decision to list the characteristics of a "left-wing strawmanextremist" got a lot of attention all over the blogosphere; the best response I've seen came from BooMan, who gave it a thorough demolition. (My only note is that Klein's mentality seems to operate in absolutes, which strikes me as awfully inappropriate for someone whose job it is to seek nuance and realism. Then again, it's Joe Klein.)

--There was always something about the Republican Congress (R.I.P.) that vaguely reminded me of Galaxy Quest; it doesn't help that Tom DeLay has a book coming out titled -- I swear to God -- "No Retreat, No Surrender".

And that's all I got. Consider this an open thread.

Oh, also, I want opinions on this:
The Mather House open list exploded with argument the other day (archives here, for masochists only) over our Freshman Housing Day T-shirt, after some members of the house alleged that it was sexist/tasteless/offensive. The shirt's design is: on the front, a picture of King Kong--

--climbing the Mather tower, holding a tiny blonde woman who shouts "Ahhhh! Mather!" The bone of contention: on the back of the shirt reads the phrase "That's what she said." I think it's hilarious, but I'm not sure it's appropriate or tasteful... Thoughts?