Month: November 2008

Drake Bennett:

…a depression circa 2009 might be a less visible and more isolating experience. With the diminishing price of televisions and the proliferation of channels, it’s getting easier and easier to kill time alone, and free time is one thing a 21st-century depression would create in abundance. Instead of dusty farm families, the icon of a modern-day depression might be something as subtle as the flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation’s unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available.

Good for blogs, I guess. (Hat tip: 3QD)

Stephen Baldwin, alas, isn’t going anywhere.

Does Palin even get the joke?

A reader writes:

None of Palin’s story makes sense to me: either you have something to hide, or you don’t. People are only this continuously opaque when that is the purpose – to BE opaque and escape resolution (or is that accountability?).  But as crazy as she is, as much as I don’t trust her, I have to wonder if at the bottom the Palin pregnancy story isn’t just another gross exaggeration done on the fly that has come back to haunt her. I don’t believe mere reality is something that has ever seriously impacted her thoughts or actions.

Her story reminds me of those Great White Hunter tall tales "and there I was facing the largest Bengal tiger ever seen by a man! So I raised my gun… and FIRED!"  In her small world she was probably always able to get away with "embellishments" but not on a national stage.

She got caught between a rock and a hard place. She shot her mouth off making herself the toughest pioneer woman in history, realized it made no sense and could make her appear reckless, even criminal (got to wonder how her doctor feels about all of this too), and then couldn’t retract what she said so publicly. 

And then the story was picked up by other Republicans to tout how tough the moose hunter really was!  Ouch!  It wasn’t supposed to go this way. No one was supposed to examine what she said and actually question her!  Now she’s doubling down and is waiting for it to all pass over. Kind of reminds me of someone else in high office these past 8 years …

Has anyone seen Bristol Palin lately? She’s eight months pregnant.

Eric Auner seconds Packer.

Paul Cullum has gotten ahold of an internal memo from the Thomas Kinkade movie coming out this week:

Kinkade, a postmodern Norman Rockwell for the evangelist set, instructed the crew to adhere to an aesthetic code that wouldn’t have flown in a first-year film class. The list of 16 “guidelines” on how to create “The Thomas Kinkade Look” on film, which was circulated to crew members in memo form, has been obtained exclusively by VF Daily.

My favorite is number 16:

Most important concept of all — THE CONCEPT OF LOVE. Perhaps we could make large posters that simply say "Love this movie" and post them about. I pour a lot of love into each painting, and sense that our crew has a genuine affection for this project. This starts with Michael Campus as a Director who feels great love towards this project, and should filter down through the ranks. Remember: "Every scene is the best scene."

Drezner hopes so:

A key point I’ve been making in my recent work on public intellectuals and the blogosphere is that blogs can function as an informal “peer review” system to fact-check, logic-check, and style-check more prominent PIs.  I had in mind blogswarms that surrounded people like Michael Ignatieff, Paul Krugman, and William Kristol when they made tendentious or flawed arguments.  It’s not that bloggers are smarter or sharper than other writers — they’re just willing to be more blunt in print…I’ll go out on a small limb and say that if Kristol gets his contract renewed, then it falsifies my hypothesis pretty well.

National Review’s leading intellectual for the next generation compares Palin to Reagan and Jefferson, urges Time magazine to consider Palin for year end honors, wishes Palin had been at the top of the ticket, and decribes some of the Palin-love on the National Review cruise:

On the lighter side, one foreign-policy expert showed up for a panel in a towel (but fully clothed underneath) in an act of solidarity with Palin (referencing the now debunked post-election story that she once appeared to top campaign officials in a towel). What is it about Sarah?

For many folks on the Right, she represented an influx of social conservatism in the campaign. All she had to do was arrive at the scene with her son Trig to demonstrate her pro-life bona fides. Some estimated 90 percent of Americans faced with the knowledge that they might give birth to a child with Down Syndrome wouldn’t have made the choice she and her husband, Todd, did to let the child live.

So Trig was the critical presidential qualification for the theocons. You just gotta have faith.

(Photo: Johnny Wagner/Getty.)

Washingtonians are making a pretty penny off the 4 million people expected for inauguration day. My couch is already booked, by the way.