Matthews said he told the rowdy group, “What’s this, a douchebag convention?
Category: blog
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… the principals don’t seem to be experiencing much joy as they go through their market-tested paces. A kind of faux-ness permeates everything this year in a way that it hasn’t been quite so consuming in the past. The effect has been anesthetizing and made it difficult to take any of the day’s supposed gaffes, game-changers and false umbrages seriously. The campaigns appeared locked in a paradigm of terrified superpowers’ spending blindly on redundant warfare. How many times do they have to blow up Vladivostok?
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The One Way that Weird Eastwood Thing Could Screw Things Up for the President
If any single speaker at the Democratic National Convention decides to, even slightly, make fun of Clint Eastwood.
The media and faux-outrage machine would collapse on the Time Warner Cable Arena like a ton of bricks, each of which would then be thrown through every Democratic office-holder’s window with threatening notes attached.
And I fully expect this to happen. Leave it to the Democrats to find the one rake laying in a huge open field and step directly on it.
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GOP Festival of Lies, Day Two
Once again, on day two of the Republican National Convention, it was ominous how few mentions of the nominee himself were made. It wasn’t quite as stark as it had been on day one in the speeches of Chris Christie and others, but notable nonetheless. I asserted that the first night’s speeches were evidence that the speakers were all setting themselves up for future campaigns, as they had collectively (and perhaps independently) come to the conclusion that Mitt Romney was a sinking ship.
I still think that’s true, but I also think the mostly-Romneyless speeches from Condoleezza Rice and Paul Ryan last night were also indicative of an intentional strategy to be as vague as possible about Romney and what he stands for, and instead deluge the viewer with platitudes and fuzzy imagery. Romney the man is not sellable, but generic Americanness is. If you remember that the intended audience for the prime time speeches is not the politically tuned-in or the base, but the handful of uninformed undecideds, that strategy makes perfect sense.
Remembering the intended audience also explains Paul Ryan’s shameless, brazen speech that was absolutely overflowing with lies. To anyone who is even a little bit informed, it was astounding how blatantly he simply told lie after lie about himself and the president. But to those uninformed undecideds, well, they’ll never know that nothing he said was true. So for a speech intended for those ears and eyes, it was probably a big success. Which is a horrible shame, and very damning of American society.
Update: As Dan Amira wrote:
Most of the millions of people who watched the speech on television tonight do not read fact-checks or obsessively consume news fifteen hours a day, and will never know how much Ryan’s case against Obama relied on lies and deception. Ryan’s pants are on fire, but all America saw was a barn-burner.
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Cowards at Yahoo News Give Wingnut Hacks a Scalp
David Chalian was fired by Yahoo News yesterday because he was caught saying something unflattering about the Romneys and their pals by NewsBusters.
This is absolute bullshit.
David was my direct supervisor when I interned at the ABC News political unit, where he was first deputy political director, and then promoted to director. He then worked for the NewsHour at PBS and then later Yahoo. He is a great journalist, with more intelligence and savvy than almost anyone I’ve seen, as well as being utterly fair, rigorous, and an exemplar of integrity. Everyone in the press and in the Beltway universe knows this to be true.
But then that festering swamp of self-important hacks, NewsBusters (a right-wing media “watchdog”) caught David saying this about the Romneys as they partied with fellow rich people, when he thought he was off-air:
They’re not concerned at all. They’re happy to have a party with black people drowning.
While it may not be fair to presume that the Romneys personally are “not concerned at all” about the suffering of black storm victims (David nor anyone else is capable of reading their minds), it’s certainly true that concern is not at all evident in anything the Romneys or their party does, ever. Everything their party stands for, especially recently, is devoted to obstructing African-Americans’ ability to vote and worsening their economic conditions in order to further enrich the already-wealthy. But this truth is something that cannot be grasped by conservatives today, and certainly not by the knee-jerk, offense-seeking bottom-dwellers at NewsBusters.
And Yahoo reacted in a sadly-predictable, yet utterly cowardly way. They fired David.
David Chalian (who immediately gave an extremely classy and heartfelt apology) is far too good for an outfit like Yahoo, and they just proved it. They buckled immediately, tossed a good man overboard like he had some kind of virus, and gave NewsBusters their scalp.
What a wretched day for journalism. I hope you will join me in telling Yahoo what a spineless, shameful move they’ve made, and avoid their coverage.
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My Summation of the First Night of the GOP Convention
This was a night of Republican politicians selling themselves for future campaigns. They are writing this one off.
#gop2012— Paul Fidalgo (@PaulFidalgo) August 29, 2012
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Some have said that Romney’s lifestyle is overly privileged, pointing to the fact that he has an elevator for his cars in the garage of his San Diego home. This is not entirely fair. Romney owns many homes without garage elevators and the cars have to take the stairs.
… After his governorship, Romney suffered through a midlife crisis, during which he became a social conservative. This prepared the way for his presidential run. He barely won the 2012 Republican primaries after a grueling nine-month campaign, running unopposed.
David Brooks’ “biography” of Romney.
1) I love the idea that future historians may find this column, take Brooks’ credibility into account, and presume this to be serious.
2) I can’t believe I am describing a David Brooks column as “hilarious.” Nothing makes sense to me anymore.
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Members of Team Obama still believe the Electoral College favors them; they see little or no prospect for the opposition to be able to make significant gains with Hispanics, single women or young voters; they think Medicare and tax cuts for the wealthy are untrumpable trump cards; they view Romney as a weak candidate, whose résumé and background leave him vulnerable to populist attack; and they think their candidate’s skills and likability are far too powerful to derail.
… the White House feels the balance remains on its side, especially where it counts: in the key battleground states. Team Obama is certain that, barring a national collapse, Michigan and Pennsylvania are locked up for the incumbent — a reality acknowledged by a number of Romney senior aides. The Obamans see Romney as fatally flawed in Ohio, with his venture-capital background, opposition to the auto rescue and overseas financial holdings. Even North Carolina, which some handicappers have moved safely to Romney’s column, remains in play, the re-elect believes, because of its strong grassroots organization, which the Democrats expect to grow even more during their Charlotte convention.
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Ultimately, the curated aspect of the homepage brings people to big brands, right?” [Wall Street Journal managing editor Raju Narisetti] said. “The trick is not to worry about where they’re coming from — the trick is what are they doing after they come. If they come sideways, can I get them to actually go to the homepage? That won’t happen if I diminish the value of homepage internally. I still need to make sure the homepage is engaging — just not get too hung up on people coming there first…It’s more of an engagement play than a front-door-audience play these days.
This rings very true. Whether a publication is known to me, or is a brand new discovery, the home page is almost always the second place I go. After reading a piece, it’s a way I’ll gauge whether that outlet is worth my keeping up with down the road for more content. So the home page is nt less important just because it’s not how I first enter a site, but it can confirm whether I’ll come back.
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The Myth of the Tight Presidential Race
The headline Washington Post chooses for its new poll showing a tight national popular vote race between the president and Mr. Romney says:
But this is wrong in what it implies. The headline, and much of the chatter around it, will tell you that the race is a tie. But popular votes don’t decide presidential elections, Electoral College votes do.
To get a better look at the actual state of the race, just go to FiveThirtyEight for Nate Silver’s forecasts, and you get a much different picture:
So sure, the popular vote is almost certainly “neck and neck.” But the actual presidential race is not.
Once again, there is a bag, and Obama’s victory is to be found within it.
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A scale picture of the Earth and Moon, and the distance between them. The Moon’s a lot further away than you might realise…
(clickthrough for a bigger version)
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Strange, Mindless, Near-Racist
My paraphrase of The Economist on Romney (words in bold used in the actual piece):
“We’d love to love you, but you’re a strange man with mindless policy positions who says near-racist things. Please tell us you’ve been kidding.”
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It’s very likely that there will not be a living human being who knows what Neil Armstrong knew. It will all be for videotape and digital libraries, for historians and, if we’re very lucky, for poets, as well. But there will be nobody alive who actually knows. Not a single one of our fellow humans, anywhere on the Earth. That knowledge will be as dead in the world as Columbus is. One fewer person on the Earth was able to look up at the moon on Sunday night. What he thought when he looked at, night after night, is a perspective lost to all but eight old men. Sooner or later, there will be none of them left. On that day, like today, we should mourn for what we once thought we were. From that day forward, I fear, it is all going to sound like myth and magic, and the tales that the old men told around the ancient fires.
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In Case You Needed Further Proof That Obama Has it in the Bag…
Former Florida governor, Charlie “I Must Find out Where They are Going So I Can Lead Them” Crist, endorses the president.
pav alexander 