by Chris Bodenner
Boston Globe:
The Wisconsin Advertising Project, which monitors campaign ad spending nationwide, reported yesterday that of the $48 million worth of ads the two campaigns have aired since Obama clinched the nomination in early June, 90 percent of Obama’s ads have been positive and mostly about himself, while about one-third of McCain’s commercials referred to Obama negatively.
And that was before the Britney ad.
By Patrick Appel
Jenny Diski suggests obviating sleep:
As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep. Apart from the dangers of letting your guard down, there’s the matter of time. Instead of trying to extend the life of human bodies beyond their cellular feasibility, the men and women in lab coats could be studying ways to retrieve all the time we spend asleep. A third of our lives, they say – and that probably doesn’t take the afternoon nap into account. Even if we died aged what is these days a rather youthful 70, finding a way to stay awake would increase our functional life to the equivalent of 93. And if we happened to live to 93 then we’d effectively be . . . oh, even older. Plus the nap time. Sleep, we’re told, is essential, repairing the wear and tear on body and mind, but sex was once solely for the purpose of propagating the species and we pretty much found a workaround for that biological constraint.
(Hat tip: 3QD)
By Patrick Appel Ross counters the claims of crypto-racism by Josh Marshall et al over McCain’s new ad. A reader adds:
I honestly believe the choice to use Paris Hilton and Britney Spears has nothing to do with their race, gender or sexual availability. I believe they were chosen because they are both vapid, vacuous individuals who are famous for no other reason than tabloid gossip. Britney Spears is a has-been and Paris Hilton is a never-was.
All of those other individuals are famous for something – there is substance behind their celebrity. Britney and Paris are paper-thin and without any substance whatsoever. That’s the comparison McCain was going for – trying to allege that Barack Obama is without substance, a celebrity for celebrity’s sake.
Another reader has more theories:
1) Although Paris and Britney are yesterday’s news, they have permeated the consciousness of the wider voting electorate. Even grandmothers know who Paris & Britney are, yet they might not know Beyonce and Jay Z. Plus, if they had used black celebrities, the race card would have been quickly asserted.
2) Both Paris and Britney are currently widely despised by the culture-at-large. For all practical purposes, America has a Paris & Britney hangover. Not so with the other celebs mentioned. The McCain message here is that, sure, the party’s fun while it’s happening, but watch out for the morning after.
3) Both Paris and Britney have a glossy-but-empty quality to them. THAT’s the central message the McCain campaign were trying to communicate. Trying to conflate Obama with Oprah (popular among white suburban housewives), Johnny Depp, or J.K. Rowling wouldn’t have the same effect.
By Patrick Appel
Coates puts it well:
For blacks, Jim Crow America meant, not simply white people not wanting to be around them, it meant a concerted effort to restrict the creation of wealth. Redlining wasn’t just offering a racial preference to whites (indeed it actually punished whites for living around black people) it was a government-conceived and sponsored effort to devalue the homes of black people, thus draining what little wealth there was in the communities. When post-slavery Southern and Midwestern blacks–following Booker T’s conservative line–created wealth by working the land, and building their own businesses, white terrorists violently undermined their efforts at every turn while the government refused to do its most basic job–protecting its citizens. The spectacle of lynching is horrifying–but its actual effects, dissuading black people from competing with whites–were (are) devastating. Indeed couple that with housing discrimination, job discrimination, the defunding of segregated schools and you see a comprehensive effort to render black people a servile class.
Addressing racial inequality in the same breath as economic inequality seems natural to me. Conservatives often chastize liberals (often rightly) for social engineering, but it’s hard to deny that the root of racial inequality was a massive system of social engineering itself, meant to economically advantage whites. Though the most malicious elements of that system have been dismantled, inequalitites persist generation to generation partially because of prior meddling. These long-term effects are what make social engineering so dangerous in the first place.
A few years ago, my parents were going through a property dispute and had to dig out the deed of my childhood house, part of a California development constructed in the ’40s. Unbeknownst to us, the original deed stipulated that blacks couldn’t buy the house. While this law is now null, the neighborhood remains exceedingly white partially because of these former restrictions. The segregation of the neighborhood undoubtedly drove up property values, and through there is no longer a racial barrier to owning a house in such neighborhoods, the economic barriers (created in part by former racial barriers) help to maintain inequality and de facto segregation.
For these reasons such as these, I have been fairly sympathetic to affirmative action in the past, though I found the writing of Richard Rodriquez, a beneficially of AA, a strong tonic:
There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me — when my family was working-class, and we were struggling. But very early in life I became part of the majority culture and now don’t think of myself as a minority. Yet the university said I was one. Anybody who has met a real minority — in the economic sense, not the numerical sense — would understand how ridiculous it is to describe a young man who is already at the university, already well into his studies in Italian and English Renaissance literature, as a minority. Affirmative action ignores our society’s real minorities — members of the disadvantaged classes, no matter what their race. We have this ludicrous bureaucratic sense that certain racial groups, regardless of class, are minorities. So what happens is those "minorities" at the very top of the ladder get chosen for everything.
By Jessie Roberts
The Speculist hasn’t given up hope on the flying car:
This is another way that the electric cars could become practical long-range vehicle. For short trips you drive. For long trips you fly. If there’s sufficient gas in reserve, the flying chassis could even charge your battery as you go. It could even become a popular alternative to commercial flying.
by Chris Bodenner
New York Times:
Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements. The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of weeks have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive, including the Bush team’s tactics of seeking to make campaigns referendums on its opponents — not a choice between two candidates — and attacking the opponent’s perceived strengths head-on.
Time:
For a long time, Republicans inside and outside the campaign have griped privately about the need to find their storyline. And there have been fierce debates about how to do it. Some of McCain’s former advisers have said that McCain needs to stick to his historic strengths, his maverick, straight-talking approach, which appeals to the political center. Others have urged McCain to charge at Obama head on. If the race is going to be about Obama, they reason, then Obama must be taken down. Now the debate has come to an end, and the more aggressive approach has clearly won out.
by Chris Bodenner
I’m the last person to buy into the so-called "racist" intentions of mainstream Republicans. And I think Democrats usually cry wolf on the matter, to the detriment of race relations. But reading John Riley’s post gave me pause:
We just got off a conference call with Camp McCain, defending their new ad comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. They said they thought the ad was legitimate because Obama is a big celebrity…, and Britney and Paris were Number 2 and 3. The problem: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday’s news. Here’s a link to Forbes’ Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don’t even make the list any more. Instead, the top 10, in order: Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce Knowles, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, The Police, JK Rowling, Brad Pitt. So, they didn’t pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married. What they picked was two sexually available white women.
By Patrick Appel
Wolcott gives a lesson in celebrity:
America is a country based on celebrity, a country where nearly everybody wants to be a celebrity, an American Idol, and decrying the cult of celebrity is an empty exercise in moralizing. After JFK, Reagan, and Bill Clinton, the candidate as glamour figure is already wired into our collective psyches, and Fred Thompson’s celebrity status didn’t seem to trouble Republicans when he looked like a contender, until they realized his gravitas was indistinguishable from indigestion.
By Patrick Appel
Greg Anrig and Harold Pollack counter Hanna Rosin’s article on the connection between crime and section 8 vouchers:
Memphis’s weak economy, unmentioned in The Atlantic, almost certainly bears greater responsibility for the spreading violence in a city that has a long history of high crime rates. From 1997 to 2004, Memphis experienced a 14 percent increase in the share of school children living in poverty. Robert L. Wagmiller Jr. of the University at Buffalo found that the percentage of Memphis neighborhoods classified as having low male employment nearly doubled from 6.7 percent to 12.7 percent between 1990 and 2000 — the highest level among America’s 50-largest metropolitan areas. During this time of nationally declining poverty rates, conditions in Memphis markedly worsened.
By Patrick Appel
Weigel is dumbfounded by McCain’s recklessness:
It’s really hard to tell when an attack will backfire, but at the rate McCain’s cranking out attack ads and lines about Obama lusting "to lose the war," the higher the odds he’ll wreck his image. And then Obama can say whatever he wants about McCain without much blowback. I can’t believe McCain doesn’t remember how this works.
The Dish 