This is fucking brilliant.

(SCENE: a nondescript hotel room, covered with paper, the television tuned to CNN. JOSH, TOBY, SAM, DONNA, and CJ are sitting around the room in various states of concentration.)

SAM: (reading aloud) “This election is important, not because it is about change but because it is about choice. As a politician, I choose to present you with facts. My opponent chooses to lie to you. Your job is to choose as well – but the other guy doesn’t want your job to be easy.”
TOBY: Shift from formal speech to informal conversation. Wait, did I say informal? I meant “folksy.”
SAM: Folksy?
TOBY: From my lips to L’il Abner’s ears, yes.
SAM: What’s wrong with folksy? People like folksy.
TOBY: How about he’s not folksy? How about it comes across as inauthentic? Like he’s trying to get people to like him?
CJ: But we are trying to get people to like him.
TOBY: There’s a fine line between charismatic and pathetic. You are jumping, you are vaulting over that line.
SAM: I’ll rewrite it.

Silence. Then:

JOSH: When did people stop doing math?
DONNA: For me, that would be grade eleven.
JOSH: I don’t mean – look. He’s promising to increase military spending and cut taxes, and his entire plan for not making the country go broke is cutting earmarks. That’s like you trying to pay off your credit card by saving your change when you buy gum.
DONNA: I don’t have that much on my credit card.
JOSH: Yes you do.
(Pause.)
DONNA: There was a sale on widescreen televisions.
JOSH: You watch the news and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
DONNA: And I can see every last one of their pores in glorious high definition.
JOSH: But you watch the news. Donna, how is the fiscal outlook of the United States right now?
DONNA: Are you asking me or are you asking the campaign’s press secretary?
JOSH: I’m asking you.
DONNA: Then it’s pretty bad.
JOSH: Then why does he think he can just yell out “tax cuts” and everything will work?
CJ: Because both parties spent years convincing the American electorate that we were on the wrong side of the Laffer curve and we needed to cut taxes in order to make the government more efficient and put more money in voters’ pockets.
JOSH: I know, but wouldn’t you think they’d have figured out we were all full of crap yet?
CJ: You’d think.

Silence for a while, then:

TOBY: I can’t take this any more!
JOSH: (checking watch) Who had eight-thirty to nine o’clock in the pool?
SAM and DONNA and CJ: (in unison) Charlie.
JOSH: Why do I ever let that kid gamble?
TOBY: How do I do this job? He just lies and lies and lies and nobody gives a damn!
JOSH: We do.
TOBY: You don’t count.
SAM: Black voters do. Hispanics do. Younger –
TOBY: Yes, Sam, thank you, I needed a description of the Democratic Party’s traditional base, now how about independent voters? You know, the stupid ones? I mean, I knew they were stupid, we spend most of every other year catering to their stupidity, but I thought until now they were just dense and uninterested, not actively handicapped!
JOSH: Look, we knew we’d have to grind this one out.
TOBY: This isn’t “grinding it out,” Josh. Every day they lie. Phyllis Schafly’s hot daughter is on the campaign trail every day lying – not shading the truth, not trying to make a bad thing look better, she’s just lying every time she opens her goddamn mouth about things that are in the public record for anybody to see!
CJ: Toby, the press –
TOBY: The press! The press! The press is useless, CJ! Worse than useless! Never mind that this year the choice comes down to a gifted young leader and the Cryptkeeper and they want “balance” – you know what they call them? “Distortions.” Not lies. “Distortions.”
DONNA: “Distortions” doesn’t sound that good.
TOBY: It sounds better than “lies” and that’s all that matters. People who don’t follow politics know what “distortions” are – they’re what you get when a politician tries to make something average sound good. But this – I don’t know to fight this. We call them lies, everybody will get caught up in a big round of “everybody does it” and nobody cares. Worse, we destroy what we’ve got – a guy who people think doesn’t like it because he doesn’t like it. We’re walking a razor here and I’m out of ideas.
(Pause.)
JOSH: I vote for beer.
TOBY: Is that your answer to this?
JOSH: It’s my answer to needing beer. Come on, Toby, let’s go get a drink and then come back and tackle it fresh.
(All rise and proceed to exit. From out in the hallway…)
SAM: You know, he jumps from formal speech to folksy all the time when he writes his own stuff.
TOBY: Great. Let’s get him a straw hat and have him hum the tune to “Hee Haw.” I bet that puts Alabama in play.

To all those people emailing me to complain that the political Magic cards post was “too biased for the Democrats,” my response is thus:

(image via Weasel King)

I’ve been seeing this diary start to get passed around the internets as “proof” of the John McCain campaign’s ineptitude – that they didn’t buy McCain Foods’ hyperlink before the campaign.

People. McCain Foods is fucking gigantic. They make about six billion dollars a year in revenue and they’re a Canadian company so there isn’t really even the influence-peddling issue to consider – if they’re going to bend over for anybody, they’ll bend over for the Tories, not some dinky little American presidential campaign that’s spent less in two years than what McCain Foods makes in two weeks.

Also, consider:

Anybody who can make an advertisement like that (and McCain Foods ads are legendarily crappy, trust me) does not fear John McCain’s wrath, is what I am saying.

I’ve said before that I think people who believe Pakistan to be a Musharraf away from Islamic theocracy to be wildly overconcerned, considering that the main conflict in Pakistan is between secular conservatives and secular moderates. This story serves as further evidence for my view.

This time around, congratulations are due to mightybaldking, Matt Morrison, James Farley, Reylance, Pedro e Silva and Michael McGee, as well as myself (who edited their ideas and added a few originals of my own). So yay for them! They are nerds too.

FYI: All those appealing to me for a “more [ideologically] balanced” set of cards probably should have thought about who they were asking for a second.

continue reading "STAB AT RELEVANCE 2: THE STABBENING"

Hey, remember how everybody was saying Joe Biden would have to go easy on Sarah Palin in the veep debate to keep from looking like a bully?

After the incredible amount of abuse and bullshit she just doled out, she just gave Joe Biden permission to tear her the fuck apart.

EDIT TO ADD: And let me be blunt: a speech like that in Canadian politics gets you laughed out of the room.

When Mike Murphy and Peggy Noonan were on MSNBC, they were talking up Sarah Palin like she was the best thing since the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

However, when they’re off the air and don’t know they’re being taped…?

This year’s Republican Party platform includes support for abolishing adjusting for inflation when accounting for the federal budget.

In short: the Republican Party officially wants to pretend that inflation doesn’t exist.

continue reading "STAB AT RELEVANCE"

I haven’t said too much about the whole Sarah Palin thing, because everybody else is saying it for me in all sorts of ways.

However, I haven’t heard too much discussion of this. I am not surprised, because insinuations that Sarah Palin’s fifth child might not actually be hers are both A) tawdry and B) not relevant to her doing the job of Vice-President anyhow, so it makes total sense to me that most people who think she’s a bad pick aren’t talking about it – it’s so National Enquirer, you know?

But this comment over at Obsidian Wings more or less reflects my feelings about the situation:

Speaking as someone who has borne 2 children and has some experience with labor, midwives, obstetricians, etc., Palin’s story *is not believable*. I have no idea what really happened, but the story she tells — her water broke in Texas, she flew back to Alaska so the baby would be born there (at least 8 hours), she was back to work in 3 days — is flatly incredible.

d) to summarize (before I go cut up tomatoes): if Palin’s story is true, she could only have gotten on that plane Against Medical Advice given in the *strongest* terms. Or else she concealed her condition from her medical team, in a grossly risky way.

Palin’s story of her fifth pregnancy, as written, is just weird, and almost certainly not true. Is her behaviour here worthy of investigation? If it turns out she’s lying, is that something that should be considered a negative?

I’m genuinely asking here. My inclination is that it doesn’t matter, but… man, it’s weird.

I know my posts at The Court aren’t generally of mass importance to my readership, but this one is different. Recently, a collection of Christian activist groups, led by the abominable Charles McVety, petitioned the Canadian Judicial Council for the removal of Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin, based on her participation in the Order of Canada Advisory Council’s nomination of Henry Morgentaler to the Order of Canada.

What’s important is that their letter is little more than a pack of lies.

I’m serious, folks: spread this one around if you can. This is little more than an attempt by Canada’s religious right wing to create the “judicial activism” controversy out of nothing.

So rumour has it that Senator Evan Bayh is the hot pick for Barack Obama’s vice-presidential candidate. And hoo boy is this a bad idea. It’s a bad idea for so many reasons: his wishy-washy DLC conservatism, his singleminded hawkishness on foreign policy, his essentially boring nature, the potential for depressing Obama’s activist base by picking a candidate who’s emblematic of Washington-as-usual, the fact that he has a stupid name. But most importantly is this:

Evan Bayh has a really punchable face.

Now, before I continue, I would like to make it perfectly clear that I do not endorse or suggest, in any way, that people should punch Evan Bayh in the face. Even though he’s a DLC Democrat, he probably doesn’t deserve to be punched in the face. (Joe Lieberman probably does, though, if you’re looking for a comparison to work from.)

But look at this happy asshole, will you? The dead-eyed stare mixed with the shit-eating grin mixed with the perfect, corporate hair. Evan Bayh has the face of that bank manager, the one who’s foreclosing on your home, telling you “it’s just business” but deep down, you can tell fucking someone over like this gives him a bit of wood. I’m not saying Evan Bayh is that guy – well, possibly he is, he’s a Washington veteran and that doesn’t come without some deadening of the soul – but he looks like that guy. And you want to punch that guy in the face.

Now that we’ve established that Evan Bayh looks like a guy you would want to punch in the face, the next question to ask is this: do you want to vote for a guy you’d like to punch in the face? Generally speaking, people do not want to vote for face-punch guy. Stephen Harper has an exquisitely punchable face and it’s at least forty percent responsible for the Tories not getting a majority back in the last Canadian federal election. Do you want Evan Bayh’s facepunchability dragging down the Obama campaign?

Because it will do so. Imagine Joe Voter getting into the voting booth. Joe Voter is your typical voter: follows one or two issues closely, relies on the media to tell him about the others, votes more strongly on character issues than he would like to admit. He gets into the booth and thinks, “Well, I like Obama’s positions, but what does it say about the guy that he picked this guy I want to punch in the face for vice-president? I mean, does Obama not want to punch him in the face? Or maybe he does, but he’s a cynical politician who’s willing to work around that because he’s just another cynical politician trolling for votes. I’m not sure which is worse. I’d better vote for John McCain. He’d punch that guy in the face. Maybe shoot him, too.”

Thus, I recommend joining the “no Evan Bayh for VP” Facebook group. I would join, except that I am Canadian and do not wish to imply that my endorsement or lack thereof for a VP candidate should particularly matter. I am just saying: punchable face.

Hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings is angry about the fact that athletes are going to have to compete in the horrible Chinese smog, where they can’t be at their best (heck, where they stand a good chance of not finishing their events). This is understandable, because people like watching the Olympics; they’re fun and at their best moments display the potential for nobility inherent within the human spirit, which no doubt is what Pierre de Coubertin intended.

But make no mistake: if we have to watch athletes wheezing their way through events, turning the Olympics into a joke? Well, it’s really no less than we deserve. We’re all of us wholly complicit in China’s environmental rape. Nobody forced us to go buy cheap Chinese-made goods, but we did. (And seriously – try avoiding them. IKEA’s goods are all almost Chinese-made now, for heaven’s sake. You go to IKEA, you expect stuff to be Swedish, but no.) And we can pretend all we like that giving China the Olympics was done in the hope that their society would open up, but all that’s happened instead is the party leadership treating the Olympics as a propaganda opportunity and cracking down even more harshly on dissidents. How we’re supposed to be surprised by that happening is beyond me.

So maybe these Olympics should really, really suck. Maybe then we’ll learn something about the limits of the healing power of sport, or at the very least about the wholly scummy, sycophantic nature of the International Olympic Committee. Maybe then.

George W. Bush and John McCain claim that offshore drilling will reduce oil prices because of a psychological benefit. If we think oil will get cheaper, then it will get cheaper.

Even if this is true (which it probably isn’t, because commodities traders are not idiots), the problem with attempting to manage oil prices by instilling mass belief in something other than the stark reality of decreasing oil supply is that when people realize that the drilling isn’t going to help, the likely effect is overreaction in the opposite direction as the market panics to reassert itself.

Or, more simply, it is like this: