Month: August 2008

Leave it to the Dutch to convert dancers’ movements into a usable energy source at nightclubs. 

Ben Smith attacks Jill Stanek and tries to sort through the noise around Obama’s record on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. The Dish has discussed this issue in the past.

Martha Bayles is sick of Hollywood’s signals to young men:

The most powerful shaper of popular attitudes is the entertainment industry, and what is it doing?  This short article in today’s New York Times sums it up very effectively — all the more so because it is so bizarrely uncritical.

This mentality can be summed up simply: Young men have no minds, souls, or characters worth bothering about; they care about nothing, respect nothing, and aspire to nothing.  They are pure appetite and aggression, just waiting to be pandered to for money.  So may the best panderer win.

Already I am tired of the fuss over Michael Phelps, who has won eight gold medals but seems to have less charisma than a carp.  But at least he aspired to greatness and achieved it.  Without sports — and, of course, war — what other challenges are presented to young men?  Being the biggest gross-out on the block?

One of  Evan Baden’s Illuminati photos of digital natives "bathed in a silent, soft, and heavenly blue glow." You can flip through other images in the series here.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Texas may go there. Churches too?

From a piece by Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein:

If Bill Clinton’s project for the Democratic Party was mostly ideological, Obama’s is mostly organizational. Clinton sought to change the party’s ideas; Obama is more interested in building its infrastructure. But for what? Obama’s health-care plan was the least ambitious of the three major candidates, and his recent gestures toward the center on government wiretapping, choice, and gun control have some of his supporters concerned. At times, Obama can seem so focused on building that it’s unclear if he’s really thought through the blueprints.

Obama’s supporters have invested so much in their candidate that betrayal, or even insufficient fulfillment, could be devastating.

It’s bad enough to be disappointed by a candidate you don’t believe in. Being let down by the one who inspires you is a much more demoralizing experience. "The issue," says Joe Trippi, who ran both Dean’s and John Edwards’ presidential campaigns, "is not what happens if Obama loses or if he wins and continues to build, but if he gets there and leaves out his grass roots." winning elections, counting votes. There’s little new about that. Obama’s theory of change is simultaneously less inspiring and far more pragmatic than he’s given credit for. It relies less on a new vision of politics than on an uncommon mastery of old procedures, institutions, and organizing tactics.

This post seems to have taken off in the last hour. I’d be more than happy to air any counter-arguments. I can’t see that there are any:

In all the discussion of John McCain’s recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Continued here.

Obama has had a dreadful month since Berlin. And McCain is still only even. If you want to read a brilliant take on the strengths and weaknesses of the McCain moment, Ambers’ imagined conversation is indispensable.