Month: August 2008

In most administrations, you’d dismiss this as paranoid stoner fantasy. With Bush-Cheney, you never know. The raid itself was a disgusting assault:

According to the Los Angeles Times, witnesses described the DEA agents as "removing computers, medicine and money, and using a steel cylinder battering ram to get into the upstairs bedrooms." When they left four hours later, all that remained was "trash, counters strewn with open and empty glass jars, piles of receipts thrown on the ground, upturned couch cushions, bits of marijuana on the edges of counters and an ATM with its doors torn open and emptied. … An outdoor vegetable garden had plants uprooted, along with marijuana plants removed by the agents."

One reason to back Obama. He has said he will end this insanity.

Matt Yglesias isn’t worried about Obama.

I’m not sure this will work but it’s worth a try. During the primaries, it felt as if the voters were often controlling the campaign. Especially with Obama and Ron Paul, the pampered professionals were out-messaged, out-Youtubed and out-organized by legions of amateurs. I know the general election is inevitably more concentrated and remote than the primaries, but it’s sad to see this new media democratic moment pass. It’s especially sad when so many of us are now forced to sit back and wait for various pros to unveil their latest negative ads and then debate them – giving them oxygen and exposure and power. I really don’t want to give Steve Schmidt that kind of satisfaction, do you? I don’t want to live through another lame, predictable bout of Britney-mania without some pre-emptive mockery. So here’s a thought. Couldn’t we take some of that power away from the pros – especially with negative advertizing – by pre-empting and defusing them? What I’m thinking of is a Dish Youtube contest to come up with the least fair, most effective negative ads for both sides. The technology is widely available for making your own 30-second negative spots, and it’s good therapy. So let’s flood the zone. I know it sounds cynical, but in fact, it’s the opposite. If we can put out the most damning attacks on Obama and McCain we can, it could help dilute the nasty noise from the party establishments, expose the mechanisms of smears and take the wind out of the sails of the pros.

The idea is not to produce crude and ugly smears or lies.

The content must be factually accurate (even if horribly misleading) and the images for real. And if you want to play the race or "elitist" or emasculating card against Obama or the age or temper or war-monger card against McCain, it has to be done so that there’s an official "issues-based" defense of the ad, even though it’s transparently a smear of sorts. By doing this, we could even help expose the way in which this cynical enterprise is constructed by the pros.

Cut and paste some video and audio and make the ad you would love to run against the candidate you oppose. Put it up on Youtube and send me the link. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll post the best ones and then we can vote on the best, or worst, if you see what I mean. Maybe one of them will be so good it will go viral and shift the debate a little. Or maybe it will be too complicated for many respondents to take art. Who knows?

What I do know is that I’m sick of sitting back and waiting for the big guns to unload. The election doesn’t have to be that way any more. So let’s take back the narrative by pre-empting the nasties. And we can have some fun at the same time. Deal?

Please tell me this isn’t for real. The terror implications alone are mind-boggling.

My interest in the swimming contest at the Olympics just plummeted with the news that old-style speedoes will be missing this year. (Michael Phelps’ hot new mustache might bring me back, though.) Those modesty-protecting all-body outfits (developed by Speedo) are nonetheless a wonder of technological innovation and research:

To test the fabrics and create a suit with the least drag, they used water flumes at the University of Otago. NASA contributed by evaluating the surface friction of fabric candidates in its low-speed wind tunnel, operating at 28 meters per second to simulate swimmers moving at two meters per second in the water. NASA used an aluminum plate as a benchmark for the fabric tests.

Drag reductions identified in the water flume and wind tunnel translated to a 4% increase in speed for swimmers when wearing the new suit as opposed to wearing their regular training swimwear. The new suit even improved the swimmers’ oxygen utilization by 5% compared to the training wear.

 

Ansys focused its work on the passive drag of the suit design, which occurs when the body is in the glide position with arms outstretched in front and legs outstretched behind. Swimmers maintain this position for up to 15 meters immediately after diving and for a similar distance after kicking off underwater after each turn. CFD analysis by Ansys identified areas in which both skin-drag and form-drag occur.

The CFD simulations involved precise boundary-layer meshing techniques using software from Ansys and resolved fine fluid flow details using the precision-scanned geometries of elite swimmers. Armed with detailed fluid dynamics data from the CFD studies, Speedo and Ansys guided the final design of the new suit, such as the precise location of the ultra-low-drag LZR panels bonded onto the suit. The placement of the panels reduced skin-drag by 24% compared to Speedo’s Fastskin fabric suit.

( Photo: Nick Laham/Getty).

 

The race could get bumpier:

Judging from the dynamics we’ve seen in the past it is quite reasonable to expect the current trend to shift by half-a-dozen points. August and the conventions have been periods of substantial change in both previous elections, so if history repeats itself the next 4 or 5 weeks should be pretty interesting. The bottom line is neither campaign should be complacent or despondent. There is a lot of time left and recent history shows that both up and down swings of 6-9 points are entirely plausible.

When she’s on form, she’s peerless, and today’s column was crackling with insight. I do think McCain actually worships at the altar of celebrity (how many movies has he guest-starred in? how many SNLs? how many dinner parties in Hollywood has McCain been to? how many books has he had ghost-written burnishing his life story? how often does he put out images of his own instant celebrity years ago as a returning POW?) And Obama’s staggeringly swift rise to super-stardom is bound to unleash McCain’s inner Norma Desmond. It can’t be fun when you were such a stud for so long being ridiculed nightly as Abraham Simpson.

But I think the main McCain response to Obama is quite close to Clinton’s: who does this little pischer think he is?

Both Clinton and McCain have toiled long years inching up the greasy pole, paying their dues, enduring the brickbats. To be shoved aside by this whipper-snapper is enough to make any narcissist cranky. (They’re all narcissists to some degree of course, including Obama.) It’s less envy as such, I’d say, than resentment mixed with condescension.

I wonder if we will look back on this period and see it as the point at which Obama’s star faded or the point at which McCain panicked. Neither McCain’s brand nor Obama’s is untarnished at this point. But I suspect Obama’s has more traction in the long run, given the state of the country. I could be wrong, of course. And McCain’s heartland rapsberries at the darling of Europe are certainly entertaining.

Matthews is only 5 points behind in a possible Senate race in Pennsylvania.

Ahem:

WOLF BLITZER: Can you cite one legislative accomplishment that Senator McCain produced during those 26 years in Washington in order to achieve energy independence?

GOVERNOR ROMNEY: Well, I’m not a historian that goes through all of the pieces of legislation John McCain has worked on.

Details here.