Alright, I've Had Enough

That's it. No more. Since John Edwards and his beautiful hair left the race, it's gotten pretty boring.

So here's how we're gonna end it: flip a coin. Heads, Hillary's the nominee. Tails, it's Obama. If it ends up balancing on its side, the nomination goes to Edwards (yes, I'm still holding out hope).

Then to decide the General, we roll two 6-sided dice. The candidate whose age is closest to the combined roll is the next President.

See how easy that could be?

Ok, this entire post may have been a result of nostalgia caused by this:

ROBOT MAKES JOKES

for some reason, i've always had an odd soft spot for mitt romney. he was so delightfully and carefully manufactured, so insincere. his absurdity belied what i think is his true self: a smart, pragmatic moderate, willing to bridge divides with sane, comprehensive policy. though i hated the candidate--on the surface, there really was nothing to love about a man who out-tanredo'ed tancredo--i respected the man that, i thought, resided beneath his shallow, lacquered veneer. the problem, though, is that romney--and, to an extent, the republican base--was unable to accept the plausibility of a moderate republican as a candidate and as a president. he resorted to obfuscating his record and his positions, his ideology and his education, and, in the process, diluted his value as a public servant. if he had avoided the quasi-reactionary varnish and accepted his moderate politics, he could have been a contender---albeit one that would have lost to the democratic nominee in the fall. it's good to see that he has a manufactured sense of humor, at least.

Massachusetts Democrats: soft on Communism, adultery, spitting

I cannot overstate my outrage at seeing this local news item:

BOSTON -- Massachusetts residents could spit on the sidewalk, give a tattoo, even commit blasphemy or adultery without fear of a fine or jail time under a bill being considered on Beacon Hill.

The bill would repeal nearly two dozen so-called "blue laws" -- laws that often deal with moral or religious issues...

One of the laws mandates a $300 fine or year in jail for anyone who "wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world."

[...] The bill also would eliminate laws declaring the Communist Party a subversive organization, making adultery a criminal offense punishable by three years in jail or a $500 fine, and barring anyone from "acting in a suspicious manner around any steamboat landing, railroad depot, or any electric railway station." [...]

The bill's sponsor, state Rep. Byron Rushing, D-Boston, said there's more than just legal house-cleaning behind the legislation.

"There was a feeling that we shouldn't have laws that we never use," he said. "And there were a few laws that could be used and shouldn't."

Yeah. Good job, DEFEATOCRAT Byron Rushing. Way to give the terrorists unfettered access to our steamboat landings and electric railway stations! What will you say when Osama bin Laden and his henchmen arrive at the Old Colony House in Hingham, spitting and blaspheming (as terrorists do) with impunity, and our police are powerless to stop them? What will you say then, Byron Rushing?

(Via Dave Barry).

Apparently even in a Presidential Election year the rest of the world still exists

Cross-posted from the On Harvard Time Blog because Markus was worried about the lack of Kosovo "analysis" on DemApples.

Last week Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia. Now that place where I know there was a war or something when I was a little kid but I'm too lazy to actually read up on it (the Wikipedia entry is so long) is the world's newest country.

As jubilant citizens of newly-autonomous nations are wont to do, the Kosovoans (Kosovoites?) have been going around waving...someone else's flag (namely, Albania's). It makes perfect sense; I read somewhere that John Hancock ordered the French flag to be flown outside Independence Hall on July 5th, 1776.

The Albanian flag, of course, is one of the world's most famous Rorschach tests:

Photo from here.
Most people can only see the two-headed bird, but if you look closely enough you'll be able to see two of the flowers from Alice in Wonderland about to make out with each other.

That's right, I said it: The Albanians are supporting horticultural incestuous lesbianism.

If you read one thing this summer--

--make it David Rees' essay tearing Michael Ignatieff apart.

Ignatieff, for those who don't know him, is the sanctimonious douche who used to pontificate at the K-school's Carr Center for Human Rights about how awesome the Iraq War was, and then left to make an abortive foray into Canadian politics; David Rees is the Get Your War On guy. So the essay goes about like you'd expect. Here's a sample:

Ignatieff:

We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

Rees:

"Always and in every situation wrong?" Come on, we all like it when America wins at the Olympics, right? I bet even Ward Churchill had a crush on Mary Lou Retton, back in the day. Good thing they didn't make a baby together, though! Wow! That would have been an intense baby-- unlimited negative energy vs. unlimited positive energy and all that! For real, though: You anti-war people have got to admit, Ignatieff has you nailed. You dumb-asses who were right about everything for the wrong reasons, instead of wrong about everything for the right reasons. You lose.

Ignatieff:

An intellectual's responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician's responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

Rees:

Right off the bat, he's saying: "It was right for me to support the Iraq war when I was an academic, because academics live in outer space on Planet Zinfandel, and play with ideas all day. But now, as a politician in a country that opposed the war, I'll admit I screwed up, because politicians must deign to harness the wild mares of whimsy to the ox-cart of cold, calculated reality." So, although his judgments were objectively wrong, they were contextually appropriate. Sweet! You've been totally 0wn3d by Michael Ignatieff! And so have all those dead Iraqis.

Ignatieff:

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq's fissured sectarian history. What they didn't do was take wishes for reality. They didn't suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn't suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn't suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn't believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

Rees:

Yeah, you're right, they did. Do you know why? Because they're not retarded.

Just go read it all. You'll thank me later.

Campaigning in the Age of YouTube

Looking at the source of my prior post, I was browsing ThisJustIn.com, apparently a humor segment of HBO. This next post takes the announcement videos of Democratic candidates and tries to give them some pointers on how to make a popular YouTube video, taking off on the LonelyGirl15 videos, crazy dance videos, the Diet Coke and Mentos phenomenon, and the classic physical humor/slapstick humor videos. Enjoy!