August 20, 2008
THERE'S YOUR TICKET:
Local Clinton backers, McCain adviser meet (BORYS KRAWCZENIUK, 8/20/08, The Scranton Times-Tribune)
A brother of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and local Democrats who backed her unsuccessful presidential campaign socialized privately Monday with a top surrogate of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain.The private gathering featured Carly Fiorina, Mr. McCain’s top economic adviser, and took place at the Dunmore home of political consultant Jamie Brazil, a longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton’s family who has signed on as paid national director of Mr. McCain’s Citizens for McCain Coalition.
The attendees included Tony Rodham, Mrs. Clinton’s youngest sibling, his wife, Megan, and their two children; attorney Kathleen Granahan Kane, who coordinated Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign in Northeast Pennsylvania during the primary election; and Virginia McGregor, sister of Scranton Mayor Chris Doherty.
With the Democratic National Convention less than a week away, the gathering raises questions about the support Illinois Sen. Barack Obama can expect from former local supporters of Mrs. Clinton, who dominated at the polls in the Northeast in the April primary election. Mrs. Clinton won 74 percent of Lackawanna County Democrats to Mr. Obama’s 26 percent.
Ms. Fiorina’s daylong local visit, part of a two-day bus tour of the state, was aimed at talking disenchanted former supporters of Mrs. Clinton into supporting Mr. McCain.
How about McCain/Hillary, just for the fun of watching peoples' heads explode?
IT'S ONE OF THOSE SEATS THE PRESIDENTIAL WILL DETERMINE:
Walk the Talk: A conservative talk radio host runs for Congress in New Hampshire. (Fred Barnes, 08/20/2008, Weekly Standard)
PRIMARY ELECTIONS AMONG challengers for a House seat held by the other party aren't normally of great political interest. But the race for the Republican nomination in a New Hampshire district is an exception. The reason: Jennifer Horn, a conservative talk radio host, is running. She's the first member of the talk radio tribe, so far as I know, to give up her radio perch to run for Congress. [...]Horn's breakthrough in the race came last week when she won the endorsement of the state's most influential newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader, after being grilled by publisher Joe McQuaid and editorial page editor Drew Cline. "She is smart, likable, energetic, and solid on the issues," the paper wrote. "She stands the best chance of beating [Democrat] Paul Hodes this November, and if elected, she would vote the way a New Hampshire representative ought to--for smaller, more responsible government, a strong national defense and low taxes."
Hodes defeated Charles Bass, a 12-year Republican incumbent, in the Democratic landslide in 2006 in New Hampshire, once considered a reliably Republican state. Now Republicans regard the other freshman House member in New Hampshire, Carol Shea-Porter, as particularly vulnerable, Hodes less so.
Nonetheless, Republican officials in Washington and state party chairman Fergus Cullen went to trouble of meeting with Horn last fall and urging her to run against Hodes.
WHAT IS "NO WOMAN, NO CRY"...:
Did the Banana Splits inspire Bob Marley? (BBC, 8/20/08)
One is a children's TV classic, the other a famous reggae musician - but does the similarity between the Banana Splits' theme song and Bob Marley's Buffalo Soldier suggest the reggae icon had a rather unusual muse?Listen to Buffalo Soldier - key lyric "Woy yo yo" - and The Tra La La Song, and it might seem like there is an echo in the room.
...but an homage to The Little Rascals?
DON'T LOOK AT ME, I JUST WORKED THE OVENS... (via Kein Whited)
The Real Story of the Democrats’ Abortion Plank (Steven Waldman, 8/19/08, Wall Street Journal)
The Obama campaign made a crucial decision – not to have the abortion rights and antiabortion forces meet. “It was a cordial harmonious process in which neither side talked directly to each other,” said Michael Yaki, the platform director who worked on crafting the abortion plank. During July he held about a dozen face-to-face meetings with groups in a conference room at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington but always made sure that pro-life and pro-choice sides were not scheduled back-to-back lest they bump into each other.On the evangelical side, the key players were the Rev. Joel Hunter of Northland Church, the Rev. Tony Campolo, a progressive evangelical who was on the Democrats’ platform committee, and the Rev. Jim Wallis, leader of Sojourners. Each was politically progressive in other ways but firmly anti-abortion. Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good were the leading Catholic advocacy groups for the pro-life position.
On the pro-choice side, the key players represented the National Abortion Rights Action League, Planned Parenthood, Emily’s List and the National Organization for Women.
At no point did the pro-lifers push hard for legal restrictions on abortions, including partial birth abortions. But they did push for clear language casting the Democratic Party as supporting a reduction in the number of abortions and not merely a reduction in the “need” for abortion. [...]
The pro-choice forces had two concerns. First, they feared that calling for reducing the number of abortions could lead to more legal restrictions on abortion. The pro-life progressives, Ms. Laser and the Obama campaign had to convince the pro-choice leaders that they could embrace abortion reduction without it eroding legal rights. “There’s been this fear factor that somehow looking for common ground will mean the demise of abortion rights. There was an intense fear of the slippery slope,” Ms. Laser says.
Their second fear was that the language would somehow stigmatize women who had abortions – “that it’s a morally wrong decision,” Ms. Laser says.
Mr. Yaki viewed this as the landmine that could blow up the discussions. He decided to avoid moralistic language, including any direct statement that the party wanted to reduce the number of abortions. “We deliberately steered the language from having any morality put into it because it would have been difficult to agree on the definition of morality – Biblical, societal, individual. Once you go down that path, the ability to reach a compromise would have been limited.”
Instead, he tried to craft the plank so “either side could put their own moral gloss on the language.”
Sort of like saying you don't want to place any restrictions on the Holocaust, just take actions so that the Germans don't "need" to kill Jews and gypsies...and, by the way, none of this should be taken as a moral judgment on genocide..
DO WE HAVE TEN TEAMS FOR A FANTASY FOOTBALL LEAGUE?:
I set up a free league at Facebook, if we can get enough people who'd pay attention for the whole season and we can do a live draft or autopick. Contact me on Facebook if you want an invite.
WHEN YOU TEE YOURSELF UP...:
McCain sez it's judgment not patriotism he's questioning (Jonathan Martin, 8/20/08, Politico)
“Yesterday, Senator Obama got a little testy on this issue,” McCain is set to say at a town hall in New Mexico. “He said that I am questioning his patriotism. Let me be clear: I am not questioning his patriotism; I am questioning his judgment.
...you can't complain when your opponent hits you 350 yards down the middle of the fairway....
WHAT'S UNSALTED BUTTER?:
Tortellini with Bacon and Spinach (Arlene Burnett, 8/20/08, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
* 1 pound tortellini
* 4 slices bacon
* 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
* 1 bag of spinach or arugula
* Grated parmesan cheeseCook tortellini according to package directions. Cook the bacon and set aside. Discard drippings. Brown butter in pan. Add bacon and spinach to pan. Place hot tortellini on top. Put the lid on the pan and let the spinach steam for a few minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Place on serving platter and serve with grated parmesan cheese.
ONE MORE REASON THE UNICORN RIDER CAN'T PICK JOE BIDEN:
McCain winning in new poll, follows trend (DAVID PAUL KUHN, 8/20/08, Politico)
John McCain has overtaken Barack Obama in the presidential race, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released Wednesday morning.McCain leads Obama 46 to 41 percent among likely voters, which the poll found is outside the margin of error. Reuters/Zogby had Obama ahead by 7-points as recently as mid July.
Senator Obama needs a big convention bounce just to make this race competitive and he can't afford to spend it defending his vp pick.
THE HIGH ARTISTIC COST OF BEING ANTI-AMERICAN:
"The Dark Knight" (James Bowman, 8/19/2008, American Spectator)
[T]he elevation of the outlandish and unimaginable to a starring role ultimately ended in the death of motivation itself. Today's evil icon is not Norman Bates but Hannibal Lecter: the psycho who is not a psycho for any reason, except for the reason that he just loves being a psycho. As a result, evil becomes a sort of fashion statement. It doesn't really count as evil if there is a motive or an explanation for it. It must be evil for evil's sake. There is no better example of this than the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, currently setting box office records, partly because -- I believe -- of just this transformation of human evil into something glamorous, something with the power to seduce even the best of us. Partly, too, it's because Heath Ledger, the actor whose performance now bids fair to supersede even Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal as the iconic example of that glamorous figure, the serial killer, died shortly after filming of the movie was completed and, as more than one critic has suggested, the insomnia and depression for which he took an accidental overdose may have been caused by the disturbing nature of the role of the Joker.He is described in the movie as one of those who "just want to watch the world burn." Are there such men? Conceivably. But history affords no example of them, outside of comic books and the movies, attaining the sort of power it would take actually to burn the world, or even any very significant part of it. Reality seems to provide a natural check upon such people in the form of a shortage of those who both (a) share their psychosis and (b) are willing to play the part of humble assistant -- rather than starring as the evil genius themselves -- in accomplishing their purposes. This problem for the would-be evil geniuses -- a reassurance to the rest of us -- is what creates the distinctive unreality of Mr. Nolan's movie. Again and again we see Mr. Ledger's Joker pulling off the most fantastically conceived acts of evil which, in real life, would require a virtual army of assistants, many of whom would have to be almost as clever as he is. Yet the movie shows us not even one. We do see the Joker lording it over some fellow criminals on a couple of occasions -- not the best way to gain their cooperation, one might have thought. And, in the bank robbery with which the film opens, he casually murders all his assistants, which is even less likely to help him with any hypothetical recruitment effort. So how does he do it?
Ah! That is of course the question that must not be asked if the movie is not to drown -- as I believe it does drown -- in its own preposterousness. This, we are to understand, is strictly a comic book movie, a movie whose action isn't supposed to look like reality but only like the childish fantasy of a comic book world in which anything can happen. All the Joker's tricks occur as if by magic -- they are, like the evil deeds of the villainous hero of No Country for Old Men, inverted miracles -- because, in the comic book world of the serial killer, not only have we dispensed with motivation, we have also dispensed with other sorts of explanation. It would be very vulgar and uncool of the comic book audience to ask -- as the audience of those old-fashioned policiers and detective stories used to ask -- to see how the trick was done: how the crime was committed or how the criminal was caught. That went out with Dragnet. This must be why, so far as I know, no critic among the many who have so lavishly praised The Dark Knight has so far had the bad taste to cite its wild implausibilities even as flaws in Mr. Nolan's masterpiece, let alone fatal ones.
But I think that the movie pays a terrible price for its exploitation of comic book conventions in order to give itself this peculiar, unworldly appearance. For when the movie attempts to turn serious and make the transition from fantasy-land back to reality in order to proclaim a moral, I find it impossible to take it seriously. Of course it doesn't help that the moral is such a feeble and familiar one -- in fact, a comic-book moral to go along with the rest of the comic-book trappings -- namely, yet another iteration of that favorite Hollywood trope about how the hero and the villain are really just two sides of the same coin. Only the fact that intelligent people still, unaccountably in my view, regard this as a profundity can account for either the critical reception or the box office success of the movie. Those wishing to read more about my critique of this notion as a moral or political judgment are welcome to consult my review of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, but here I'd only like to point out that anyone who finds it unbelievable when exemplified in a relatively real-looking scenario can hardly be expected to find it any more persuasive when the hero and villain are two such comic-book grotesques as Batman and the Joker.
Of course, the movie's admirers won't mind the comic book trappings, and that is their right, but even they must see that its attempts at seriousness are that much less serious for them. If everything else in the movie is unreal and belongs to the comic book world, how can we believe that the moral alone belongs to the real world? And such a moral! I have heard the convergence of Batman and the Joker compared to that between John Wayne and Lee Marvin in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But Ford was telling us that people want to believe heroism grows out of reason and law and civilization but that it really doesn't. Instead, it is a throwback to the most primitive honor cultures before there were any law or civilization, which are things that cannot be contracted for. The Dark Knight tells us the opposite: that both heroism and villainy grow out of reason and law and civilization and that, therefore, these things are mere shams and subterfuges masking a Hobbesian reality devoid even of honor, in which man is a wolf to man and there is nothing to believe in but the individual Nietzschean will, either to good or evil. It's the sort of thing that you have to be an emotional adolescent, steeped in his own anti-social fantasies, in order to believe.
Senator Obama has made a similar argument, that America has done evil things for good reasons and thus become an evil-doer, but no one ever asks him to explain himself either.
IVAN GOT HIS PEN:
REVIEW: of Trumbo (Lloyd Billingsley, 8/20/2008, FrontPageMagazine.com)
Here movie stars such Brian Dennehy, Donald Sutherland, David Strathairn, Nathan Lane, Josh Lucas, Michael Douglas and others read excerpts from Trumbo’s own works. The intent seems clear enough, to replicate the effect of the famous scene Trumbo wrote in Spartacus, based on the Howard Fast novel, where slaves rise in turn and say “I am Spartacus.” The movie stars try very hard and the in-your-face closeups grab viewers by the lapels, but it doesn't work for a simple reason.Trumbo’s purpose, like that of this film, is not to reveal but conceal. He’s an elephantine writer, full of wind and freighted with pompous filler. I saw this film in Berkeley, and outside of a chuckle during Trumbo’s meditation on masturbation, nobody clapped or even cheered.
One reading the actors skipped is from Trumbo’s novel, The Remarkable Andrew, in which the ghost of President Andrew Jackson appears from the dead and argues against an alliance with England. “There’s no point in cooking up an alliance with a country that’s already licked,” Jackson says. This came out during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which is when Trumbo joined the Communist Party USA, at the very time when many others were bailing out. At the time the Nazis and Communists were working together against the Allies, so Dalton Trumbo had to be a special kind of person to prostitute his talent.
That is not explained here, and the Communist Party gets only a few lines, including Trumbo's quip that its members were no more dangerous than the Elks, which received one laugh from a member of the Berkeley audience. Just for the record, it was members of the Communist Party USA, not the Elks, who handed American nuclear secrets to Stalin, the worst mass murderer in history, who is not mentioned a single time in Trumbo.
It is because of the Communists and their fellow travelers and the vile ethos of betraying your country for your friends that Serpico is one of the most important movies of the '70s.
NOT A TRICK QUESTION:
History says Obama needs experienced VP: Running mate can tip scales in a close race (Martin Sieff, UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL)
Vice President Dick Cheney has been widely reviled by the left for his purported exercise of exceptional power during President Bush's two terms in office. Mr. Bush might not even have squeaked into the White House at all if it hadn't been for Mr. Cheney. [...]Mr. Cheney could boast an exceptional amount of experience, especially as President George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense from 1989 to 1993. His resume reassured a lot of centrist voters that George W. Bush would be an acceptable choice even though he had no national experience at the time.
While it's obviously absurd to compare a two term governor of a state with one of the largest economies in the world to a junior senator without a single piece of legislation to his credit, just for the sake of argument let us assume that the Unicorn Rider finds himself in a rather similar position to that of George W. Bush in Summer 2000. Mr. Bush chose as his running mate a guy who'd been Chief of Staff to a previous president and Secretary of Defense of the United States in time of war. For all the talk of his "experience," what has Joe Biden ever done that a serious person might consider experience that prepares one for the presidency?
Here's a hilarious example of what we're getting at, from a column making "The Case for Joe Biden":
There's no one in the Democratic Party who knows more about foreign policy and is as comfortable speaking about it as Biden.
Go to any college campus in America and you'll find a Government department full of Democrats who know just as much about foreign policy as Mr. Biden and are just as comfortable talking about it. But what experience do they have applying it? Oh yeah, pretty much the same as the Senator.
MORE:
‘Just Words’ That Joe Biden Would Like To Forget: The curse of a loose mouth and Nexis. (Jim Geraghty, 8/20/08, National Review)