Oh please yes

Bush pushes Romney as McCain veep choice. At least they wouldn't run out of money, but this seems like an unusually dumb idea, even for Bush. Besides, don't all the candidates hate the guy?

What I'm listening to today

From Crackle: sex over the phone

Maybe this WAS a bad idea

New pics from the new Watchmen movie out. I'd feel a lot better about the prospect of adapting the most widely esteemed comic book ever written if it didn't look a lot like this monstrosity.

Bubbling up

It seemed an unbelievably minor story at the time, but the making-Obama-blacker in the ad thing really seems to have legs. How long before it shows up in Leno and Letterman's monologues? Unlike a lot of shady stuff the Clintons have done, this is a really accessible shady thing. You needn't know anything about politics to realize it's shady to darken a black candidate's skin. You can never predict how these negative sorts of stories develop, but this one seems to be bubbling up.

I'm a 7k person

One thing I won't make fun of Mike for is the ladders commercials. Apparently if you make six figures you're an asshole when your website has the tagline:

The premium job site created exclusively for $100k+ people looking for $100k+ jobs.

I've never been less in favor of a flat tax.

With all this silly talk of ladders though, lets have a few laughs

I don't have to grow a moustache!!!

Can't help but notice that Mike's uncharacteristically quiet today on the blog front after his man Obama won only Vermont last night. Don't worry, Obama will only lose something like 10 delegates in Texas.

The main disappointment for me after last night is that we have another month of campaigning. I have this haunting suspicion that the Democrats are going to butcher one another to the point where McCain will have a significantly easier job attacking either of them. You can only hear that Obama is inexperienced and that Clinton is well, a Clinton without picking up on it.

That said, Gravel 08.

Back to making fun of Mike though. Given his undying love for Obama, it's surprising that his entire post contained numerous consonants. Because if 'Fight Club' taught me anything (which it didn't) is that one can only talk in vowels when you have a cylindrical object in your mouth.

How about giving the balls some love?

The Ladders

One of the ads you see the most during the election coverage is for this job site called "The Ladders," which, according to the ad, only posts listings for jobs that pay over $100k a year. This would indicate that the market research shows that the people who watch MSNBC/CNN are pretty rich. But most of the other ads seem along the "Invest in gold!" "Veterans cannot be turned down!" "I've fallen and I can't get up!" variety. Hardly the highbrow crowd.

Someone's guessing wrong.

Ohio

Looks like Clinton is building a pretty substantial margin. But then you'd forget that Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Hamilton (Cincinnati) and Lucas (Toledo) counties have basically reported zero votes so far, and should tip things substantially towards Obama. There's a reason the networks won't call it yet (even if the pundits are talking like its a done deal).

UPDATE: Literally moments after first posting this, MSNBC's Chuck Todd (whose delegate analysis has become the must-see TV of the primary cycle) echoes my caution in calling Ohio using the exact same evidence. Maybe he's one of my few readers!

Listening to...

Digitalism - Zdarlight

More on Texas

Obama's ahead, despite no returns yet from Austin, San Antonio, Houston or Dallas. My guess is that the margin (7% right now) continues to grow.

As for Ohio, the 20 point gap might be too tough for him to overcome, despite the fact his most favorable districts aren't in yet. I expect this one to get called for Hillary in short order.

Roethlisberger's Big Contract

Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger just signed an 8-year $102 million contract with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Now, I know that the numbers attached to NFL contracts are essentially meaningless, but wow, $102 million for Roethlisberger? Would any other team in the NFL have offered him half of that?

I'm a strong believer that you can't put a price on having a reliable quarterback, but Roethlisberger is hardly a star (despite having won a Superbowl). This mega-contract has the highest boondoggle potential since Mike Vick's $100 million contract.

Huckabee drops out

Huckabee finally concedes to the inevitable.

No surprise here, but we may never know why Huckabee spent so long staying in the race after it had been decided. Oddly though, Huckabee seems to have come out of it much stronger, and will be a contender in 2012.

Contrary to what many think, I think Huckabee could be a strong veep choice for McCain. Despite his extreme views, he's the most likable guy in either party, and that's worth a lot.

Obama locks up Japanese fisherman vote

The small Japanese fishing town of Obama has gone wild for Barack Obama, even moreso after receiving a letter from the campaign thanking them for their support.

I remember reading somewhere that there were more towns in the US named Clinton than any other name. Where's their support?

Texas Results - Good News for Barack

Most read the exit polls as a narrow win for Clinton.

They made the same mistake that those on Super Tuesday made. The same way absentee ballots, which don't show up in exit polls, tipped California for Clinton, early Texas voting (which looks to have gone about 60/40 Obama) will tip things for Obama, assuming she narrowly won among those who voted today.

Obama will win Texas, probably by 4 or 5 points at least.

Leaked Exit Polls

Drudge reports exit polls show a deadlock in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. That Rhode Island is even in play at this stage has to be good news for Obama.

Science Confirms It

Hillary's appearance at the end of the "3 A.M." ad really DOES scare undecided voters. Science confirms it! The scores for undecideds in Slate's focus group plummet when the image of Hillary appears on the screen.

Hillary on the Daily Show

She looks tired and unfocused. All this campaigning seems to be getting to her. I won't savage her comedy timing (some have said she bombed) except to say it's like watching your mom out there (not my mom, who I actually think can be pretty witty. Your mom) which makes a lot of sense, considering she's a 60-year-old woman and all.

Anyway, here's the video:

Predictions for tonight

Hillary +8 in Ohio
and I'm going out on a limb here and say Hillary +3 in Texas

A Jon Stewart bump? ha, unlikely. It'll be hard to shave off too many white college votes. Still, I have this underlying suspicion that Clinton has a few tricks up her sleeve. I say Mike and I make a bet, whoever's closer to the totals wins respect and adoration, and the loser has to grow a moustache. I'm blonde, so I have extra incentive to win. Blonde moustache's are incredibly creepy.

oh, and who cares about RI and VT

The Last Word on a Tiresome Subject

I've avoided giving too much thought to Jonah Goldberg's much discussed bestseller, Liberal Fascism, because I think the entire enterprise is so obviously stupid as to merit almost no consideration. In fact, the strenuous denunciations from various liberal intellectuals only gave the idiotic tome more legitimacy than it deserves.

So, I'm hoping that Michael Tomasky's masterful takedown of the book in the New Republic will close the chapter on having to comment on it. There's no better sort of book review to read than one written by a very intelligent person (Tomasky certainly qualifies) about a book they intend to completely destroy (see also Ross Douthat's review of Christopher Hitchen's god is not great for another example of the genre).

I doubt it will make any dent in the runaway sales success of the book, however.

Marc Andreessen on Obama

Netscape founder Marc Andreessen blogs on his 90 minute-long meeting with Barack Obama in 2007. I really advise reading the entire thing, as it's a really good analysis of Obama's character, but one passage really leapt out at me:

We asked him directly, how concerned should we be that you haven't had meaningful experience as an executive -- as a manager and leader of people?

He said, watch how I run my campaign -- you'll see my leadership skills in action.

As I've said before, if you want to see who is the stronger leader, you need only compare how the campaigns have been run so far. McCain and Clinton have both squandered huge amounts of cash, had high amounts of staff turnover and infighting and blew once-inevitable-looking leads early in the campaign. Obama's campaign, on the other hand, has been nearly flawless. What does that say about the comparative leadership styles?

Surefire (and not so surefire) Ohio/Texas Predictions

Surefire predictions:

• Regardless of the results tomorrow, Hillary Clinton will not announce her withdrawal from the race tomorrow night.
• Regardless of the results tomorrow, Bill Richardson will endorse Barack Obama, most likely soon after the election.
• Hillary Clinton's camp will be accused of more caucus shenanigans in Texas.
• Obama will win Vermont.
• Hillary will win Rhode Island.
• The words "change" and "experience" will be uttered another thousand times during the news coverage.

Less than surefire predictions:

• Obama will win Texas's primary by 7% as well winning the subsequent caucus by a larger margin.
  
• Hillary will win Ohio's primary by 5%.
• If Hillary wins either state, she will stay in the race for at least a week.
  
• If Hillary wins either state, and if she drops out before Pennsylvania, it will be because her money is gone, rather than because of calls from the media that she should drop out.
• If/when Hillary drops out of the race, her campaign's financial situation through February will be revealed to be worse than her campaign was claiming.

Regardless of the results, it'll be a very interesting night.

Last weekend

Some of you may be wondering why posting was so light over the weekend. To those that thought I may have lost interest in this blogging project - well, I haven't. I was working 14 hour days and too tired to pick up the keyboard. I look forward to resuming my previously rapid pace.

Joe Wilson

Shameless Clinton surrogate Joe Wilson pens an Obama hit piece on his foreign policy record. To anyone who still labored under the delusion that this empty-suit had an ounce of credibility, this shallow piece, full of out-of-context quotations and logical fallacies, should prove once and for all why Wilson has earned his reputation in Washington as a complete hack.

It's understandable that the progressive blogosphere rallied behind him when it looked like they could score points on Bush, but too many lionized him just because Bush wronged him, without looking at his views or record.

Along with getting rid of Mark Penn, getting rid of Joe Wilson is another great reason to root for an Obama win tomorrow.

Oh, and speaking of Penn, Ezra Klein speaks for me regarding Penn's recent behavior:

In general, I'm very, very hard on Mark Penn. I think his politics are odious, his business dealings reprehensible, and his professional work shoddy beyond measure. And now, watching him desperately try and squirm away from the Clinton campaign while it's still going on, I wonder if I've been too easy on the guy. From The LA Times: "Penn said in an e-mail over the weekend that he had 'no direct authority in the campaign,' describing himself as merely 'an outside message advisor with no campaign staff reporting to me.'" Of course, he wasn't complaining, or writing furious e-mails to correct the record, last April, when the Washington Post reported, "Penn, 53, is [Clinton's] chief strategist. While not her campaign manager in name, Penn controls the main elements of her campaign." Now he's not only abandoning her, but by talking to reporters about campaign dissension mere days before Ohio, he's stepping all over her message. If the e-mail was accidental, that makes him incompetent. If not, it makes him cravenly opportunistic.

It really shocks me how many of Clinton's closest advisers and surrogates I harbor an intense dislike for (Penn, Wilson and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, to name three), and how few of Obama's people generate similar feelings (in fact, only one, his chief Maryland surrogate, Attorney General Doug Gansler) What is it about Obama's campaign that has kept the extremely large left-wing-hackocracy away?

Charlie Crist

I think we can cross Florida governor Charlie Crist off the McCain veep list if the rumors about his personal life have any truth to them.

Listening to...

Aphex Twin - Fingerbib

The Hippest Baseball Simulator Ever

Video game developer 2K sports have asked indie rock-tastemaker Pitchfork to pick songs for the soundtrack to their upcoming Major League Baseball Sim MLB2K8. Cause if there's one things jocks love, it's indie rock, right?

I'm not knowledgeable enough about this to know whether its just a policy of good taste from 2K sports (whose NBA series has also had surprisingly good music featured) or if getting a soundtrack full of small-label bands is done for economic reasons.

Why Clinton Stays in the Race

Mark Halperin writes a list of reasons that Clinton would stay in the Presidential race after Tuesday. What he seems to be missing is what the rationale would be if she has almost no chance of actually winning the thing, which, barring a blowout on Tuesday, is the likeliest outcome.

Matt Yglesias I think is a lot closer to the real reason:

Now under the circumstances, I see no real way for Clinton to make up the lost delegate lead, but at this point it does seem to me that she and her campaign staff are probably egomaniacal enough that if they pull out a narrow "win" they'll keep running anyway hoping for lightning to strike and seeing the damage it'll do to the party as a feature, rather than a bug, since a crippled Obama who loses to John McCain could set them up for another run in 2012.

In hindsight, Bill Clinton's relatively lukewarm support of John Kerry in 2004 makes a lot of sense. For these two, anything that doesn't result in the greater glory of the Clintons, regardless of harm to their party, isn't worth their consideration.

Like a rock in the ocean

Don't let Mike's Obama facade fool you, he's Gravel all the way.

In fact I think he's going to Gravel's Award Ceremony today at Columbia University from their College of General Studies....


sorry, I couldn't think of anything to post and got web-lonely. All I really wanted to do was mention that Gravel was getting an award from a College of General Studies. What can a College of General studies award you for you may ask??? Why, it's the "Amelia Earhart Award."

Wait what? So Columbia wants Gravel to fly a plane into the ocean?

Ivy league assholes I tell you

This makes me sooo mad, I wonder what Mike's been doing in the mean time to get his message out.



No. I take it back. Gravel's campaign couldn't even afford imovie. At least his staring at the camera and throwing a rock would have gotten him a B- as an undergrad film student (a bit derivative of Herzog, no?).

Columbia got it right, drown the crazy bastard.

The Fiction Cracks

The same day Hillary goes up with her red-phone ad, her campaign is asked on a conference call to give an example of when she was tested by a foreign policy crisis.

Silence ensues.

The "experience" card was always a tough one for Clinton, because, really, she has about the same amount of experience as Obama or Edwards. I think "fame and familiarity" are a much better way to encapsulate her actual advantage over them. It may explain why she tends to lose support as voters become more familiar with her rivals: if all she has to offer is being better known, that's a pretty easy advantage to lose.

Listening to...

Man or Astro-man? - Theme from Eeviac

I'd say this album was the best retro-sci-fi-surf-rock album of 1999.

Hillary Clinton's "3 A.M. Phonecall" Ad

It seems like this scare-mongering new ad would be a lot more effective if the final image of Hillary picking up the phone was able to reassure me instead of scaring me even more. Like, maybe if this ad was run against McCain, it could be effective (cut to: red button being pressed).

It's a last-minute Hail Mary from the Clinton people (and I have little doubt who is behind it) but I'd be shocked if it's able to stem the tide. Maybe she hangs on in Ohio, but I think for Texas, this is too-little-too-late.

Bill Simmons for NBA GM

A fantastic idea that I hope someone takes seriously. Normally, I'd say taking a fan to run an enterprise is a poor idea, but considering some of the jokers who managed to score jobs managing top flight sports franchises, you couldn't do much worse.

If the Bucks pass him up, I'd take him for GM of either of the sorry franchises I root for.

Not that this should surprise you...

But the record labels haven't given a dime of the piracy lawsuit money to their artists. Something to think about the next time they come whining to Congress about bankrupting the talent.

Yellow License Plates for Drunk Drivers

This seems like a pretty poor idea to me. The whole "shaming people who have committed crimes" thing seems to be too harshly punitive and medieval, and in many cases, I think, misunderstands how lawbreakers think. When the consequences for getting caught are already so high, adding a humiliating little extra punishment seems, well, cruel and unusual.

The aspect of this that I like is letting law enforcement know who is a former drunk driver. Maybe if there was an infra-red beacon instead of a shaming device, this idea is practical. Obviously, it'll result in a lot more repeat offenders getting pulled over late at night (even when they don't deserve it), but wouldn't that prospect deter you from trying again, knowing that the likelihood of getting caught has substantially increased?

Listening to...

Hot Chip - Ready for the Floor

Numbers from Nowhere

Mark Halperin reports on the latest word out of Hillaryland. Pretty much what you'd expect from her top advisors (what are they gonna do, admit that morale is low?) but there's one item that deserves more scrutiny than the press is giving it.

Plus: McAuliffe announces campaign has raised over $35 million with 200,000 new donors in February. They’ve raised $167 million total, $145 million for primary campaign.

Is there any independent verification for this number? If this were true, then it would hardly explain why the Clinton campaign is acting a lot like it's almost out of money altogether. My gut says that a huge percentage of the $35 million is maxed-out contributors (who constitute a majority of Clinton's donors) double dipping by contributing money earmarked for the general election. Romney tried the same trick after his loss in New Hampshire (later admitting that 3/4 of what he announced he raised was general election money).

It would certainly gibe with the Clinton campaign putting more effort into pretending they're winning than actually, like, winning.

Update: Aides say that "almost all" of the money is primary money. I'll believe it when I see the hard numbers at the end of the quarter.

Obama's Branding

Newsweek's Andrew Romano interviews typography expert Michael Bierut about Barack Obama's branding strategy. Very interesting piece. A particularly stunning passage:

Is Obama's stuff on the level with the best commercial brand design?
I think it's just as good or better. I have sophisticated clients who pay me and other people well to try to keep them on the straight and narrow, and they have trouble getting everything set in the same typeface. And he seems to be able to do it in Cleveland and Cincinnati and Houston and San Antonio. Every time you look, all those signs are perfect. Graphic designers like me don't understand how it's happening. It's unprecedented and inconceivable to us. The people in the know are flabbergasted.

What does that say about his campaign?
My feeling, in my own narrow sphere as a professional graphic designer, echoes a little bit what Frank Rich wrote in his column on Sunday, where he was talking about Hillary Clinton's argument that Obama doesn't have the experience to run the country properly, and how you only needed to look at how her own campaign has been managed to see the flaw in that argument. I sort of see the same thing. I'm not sure that the commander-in-chief proves his mettle by getting everyone at his rallies to set their signs in the same typeface, but as someone who knows how hard that is, I'm very impressed.

The specific choices are also made in really good taste and I'd say to certain degree they also philosophically align with what his position is.

One of the most consistantly amazing things about Obama's campaign so far is just how relentlessly competent it is. It gives me a lot of confidence going forward. While a lot of bloggers seem to deride the notion that running a campaign well means you'll run the country well, I think it holds a lot of weight. Getting all your signs in the same typeface probably isn't as tough getting health care for every American, but if you can't even handle the signs, what hope is there?

Barack Hussein Obama

Slate's Trailhead blog meditates on the use of Barack Obama's middle name. Something that I think is worth pointing out though, is that the familiar "full name" abbrievations like FDR, JFK and LBJ that we're so used to hearing came about mostly because those presidents had names too long to fit inside newspaper headlines. Like "Nixon", "Obama" is short enough to make it a non-issue (and sounds a lot cooler than "BHO").

There's a simple and arbitrary reason that hardly anyone (besides the creators of the Simpsons) knows Richard Nixon's middle name, and yet "Delano" seems instantly familiar.

William Jefferson Clinton seems like a separate case, in which the full name was embraced cause it sounds better than "William Clinton" when "Bill" was too informal to use. "William Clinton" just doesn't sound right, rhythmically.

Listening to...

Professor Murder - Cam'ron's New Color (part 3)

Band gets bonus points for being named after a character from a Mr. Show sketch.

Bloomberg to sit this one out

Finally, we get an announcement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg that he won't run for President as an independent this election.

The timing of this announcement makes me wonder, though: is Obama's increasingly inevitable-looking lead the deciding factor here? It's an intriguing theory, but I think he would've done equally miserably in a McCain-Hillary election as he would in a McCain-Obama election.

Maybe if it had been like Paul - Kuchinich, Bloomberg's plan would've made sense. In basically any other scenario though, it seemed like a Steve Forbes-esque vanity run.

Plagiarists on Plagiarism

Slate highlights the insanity of having admitted plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin defend Barack Obama on accusations of plagiarism. Between this and the roasting he's taking over his moderation of the Democratic debate, it's been a bad week for Russert.

Song I'm listening to today

Sunshine Underground - Borders (2006)

The music video is borderline incomprehensible, but it's a pretty catchy song.

Running for President since they've been in the Senate

How ironic for Bill Clinton to call out Barack Obama for "running for President since he got in the Senate." It's because Hillary Clinton is guilty of just that that she positioned herself (disastrously) as such a hawk for the run-up to the Iraq war.

Obama, on the other hand, seemed legitimately torn about whether it was the right time to run for the Presidency in 2008. I hardly think it's accurate to say that he's been running since he got into the Senate.

Also, what happened to the Clinton campagin muzzling Bill? Guess they can't even manage that any longer.

Best Weak (pun) Ever!!!

Today while perusing the inter-tubes I realized that the media outlet seemingly made for internships, VH1, has it's own blog.

It's not particularly interesting until you notice the Top 25 Tags on the left hand side of the blog. In the interest of textual modesty, I'll only reprint the top 10...

1. Kim Kardashian's ass: Fine, I suppose it's a fine ass. But there's an ongoing discussion about the ass? That should take up 3, 5 posts to update the ass at most. Apparently Paul F. Thompkins goes on anal rants
2. Sex tapes: I mean, that Gene Simmons sex tape was worth at least a few thousand words. Don't keep your shirt on Gene, you're not me at the beach.
3. Deelishis: ???
4. Photos: "You mean vh1 has those new fangled insta-paintings!?!"
5. Tila Tequila: oh, why flog a cultural dead horse
6. Television: seriously again, we have a tag that technically fits, but no one would search. I don't go online and just blanket search 'Movies'.
7. Movies: Goddamnit
8. Video: seriously, VH1 must have the most vaguely interested readership. "i dunno, i just kinda wanna look at a moving picture."
9. Celebreality: Ok, i cede this point. At least this term is sort of honest.
10. Music: hahahaha

Hey

Ever notice how Mike posts like way too much and is a jerk.

douchebag

Department of Hyperbole

Don't journalists usually wait until someone dies tragically and unexpectedly before writing articles like the one that recently appeared in Slate about Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum? Aeroplane is indeed a beautiful album, but I'd hardly stake it as a work of a rare and mystical genius, despite Mangum's semi-disappearance. It's a well-put-together and gorgeous album by a talented singer and songwriter, and I hope Mangum's intriguing personal life doesn't distract from the record, the same way it has for the likes of Kurt Cobain and Nick Drake.

The fact that for the tenth anniversary of this landmark album we get to read about the singer instead of the music seems to indicate otherwise though.

Rove's Right

Marc Ambinder reports: Karl Rove warns against calling Obama "Hussein:"

No less an authority figure than Karl Rove has warned Republican operatives from demagoguing Barack Obama's middle name.

At a closed door meeting of GOP state executive directors in late January, Rove said the safest way to refer to Obama would be to use his honorific, "Sen. Obama."

"The context was, you're not going to stimatize this guy. You shouldn't underestimate him," one of the executive directors said. Rove said that the use of "Barack Hussein Obama" would perpetuate the notion that Republicans were bigoted and would hurt the party.

Rove also said that Republicans should refer to Hillary Clinton as "Sen. Clinton," rather than "Hillary."

Right wing figures are set to ignore Rove's advice. Rush Limbaugh used Obama's middle name more than a year ago, and Ann Coulter regularly uses the middle name, once calling him "President Hussein." So does Michael Savage, who once asked whether Obama was a "so-called friendly Muslim" or one more "radical."

Seems like solid advice to me. Honestly, I still think Rove is one of the brightest political minds of the age, and Republicans would do well to listen to him. I'm afraid, however that in the last 7 years, the right-wing-noise-machine has become too decentralized to control itself on this point. It's hard to appear to be not bigoted if you have some high-profile bigots like Coulter and Savage in your camp.

It's Wednesday!

So that means a new Zero Punctuation. Shockingly, we actually get to see the normally-disembodied game reviewer Yahtzee, and it oddly enough sort of breaks the spell of hilarity that these videos normally possess. Here's hoping he doesn't do that much in the future.

On the other hand, ZP is one of the only widely-read game review sources that has the balls to bash big-budget titles when they deserve it, and this week is no exception, with Yahtzee ripping into Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. It seems like most reviewers will only bash games like this when they're obviously broken, like the infamous Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, for fear of offending advertisers.

Video games will only pull out of their death spiral of mediocrity if there are more reviewers like Yahtzee pushing the medium in the right direction.

To catch a "To Catch a Predator"

NBC is getting sued for $100 million by the family of a man who killed himself after being ambushed in his home by the "To Catch a Predator" crew.

For those of you who still think that this show is anything but a way to exploit ruining people's lives to entertainment, read this amazing article on the show's shady practices in the Louis Conradt case. As for the Perverted Justice people, they come off as pathetic and sad more than anything else, more like a bunch of guys with nothing better to do than like a group of elite vigilante superheroes. And someone should tell this guy that if you're going to change your name, pick something less stupid sounding than "Xavier von Erck" if you want people to take you seriously.

My (evan's) contribution

In terms of any sort of mission statement, I'd only like to add that hopefully we'll strike the right balance of entertaining and well, something worth reading. Blogging tends to veer from self-serving to self-indulgent, so I'll try to keep my contributions as anonymous as possible.

With this in mind, my daily metaphorical youtube link is as follows... my contribution to this website is best represented through this music video my little brother made.

That's right, I'm the sexy one

Sorry, that's the last I'll ever reference myself or my family so overtly, but he needs the traffic.

Garfield minus garfield

Funnier than it has any right to be.

Laszlo Panaflex

We won't go into any details about our plans for this blog, because basically, we have no plans. We'll post things that interest us, regardless of topic, relevance, or being in our area of expertise. However, I can lay out a couple things:

Things that Laszlo Panaflex is not:

• A personal blog. If you know Evan or me, don't expect to be able to follow our lives by reading the blog. If you don't know us, don't expect to find out about us by reading the blog. We're planning on going out of the way to not mention anything about our actual lives.
  
• An avenue for us to promote ourselves, or our products. We don't have products, and if we did we wouldn't tell you about them. We aren't selling books or T-Shirts or anything like that.
• A partisan political blog. We're usually pretty liberal, but we don't do the dailyKos cheerleading/fundraising/rabble rousing thing.
  
• A fascist police state regarding our comments. So far we don't have any commenters (or readers, I assume), but when we do, we'll only delete obvious spam, or posts that our lawyers insist we get rid of. I don't like the idea of censoring anything, so if you want to make an ass of yourself by posting racist screeds, obscene words or any other manner of idiocy, knock yourself out, we don't take responsibility for it.

As for the name, it's from the Simpsons and in this context doesn't really mean anything. We just thought it sounded cool.

William F Buckley Dead at 82

The father of the modern conservative movement is dead today at 82. I'm too young to reflect on his heyday, but I have to say that I admired his intellect, despite his conservatism. He also gets extra credit for being one of the only conservative intellectuals not to display cognitive dissonance on the Iraq war.

He'll be missed.

Poll of the day - New Pennsylvania Numbers

New poll out of Pennsylvania shows Obama within single digits of HRC. So much for that firewall. She needs to win at least two of the three remaining big states by a wide margin to stay in this thing, and it's increasingly likely she wins zero.

Not that I expect it to last that long. She's already out of money (not a good place to be as the establishment front-runner) and narrow wins in Ohio and Texas aren't going to do anything to change that. It'd almost be better for her to get beat in one or the other next Tuesday -- winning would almost force her to fight on, while a loss let's her get out with some dignity.

One last thought on tonight's debate

I think tonight highlighted what's put this election out of reach for Hillary, she was never meant to be behind in the polls. Clinton was adept at deflecting attacks while seeming presidential and inevitable when she was the presumed front-runner, but she has become increasingly vitriolic as her numbers have declined. Tonight highlighted this when she lashed out at the moderators for "always asking her the first question." While it's nice to see genuine emotion out of a candidate, one has to assume her handlers didn't send her in with this gem, it came off as petulant and well, bizarre.

As with many things in the Youtube era, my point can be made through viral video. Here, her response to an attack in one of the New Hampshire debates is intercut with a video of a screaming cat.

Thanks Yongrel.

Shocking News #2

Eric Bana was never trained to act

Damned if you do...

What really seems to doom Clinton's candidacy at this point is that she's presented with no-win situations like tonight's debate. Fight to a draw and you fail to stop Obama's momentum (which may have already produced a decisive lead in Texas). Go on the attack and risk a huge potential backlash that could doom any future candidacy (including one for Senate Majority Leader).

It's tragic, but all she can do at this point is wait for Obama to make a huge blunder, something he seems unlikely to do.

Shocking news

Andrew Sullivan calls the debate for Obama.