Month: September 2010

Juan Carlos Hidalgo reports that even a former prohibition warrior is coming around.

Austin Carr spotlights a new ad strategy:

By swapping illegible text with an advertisement, Solve has created a system that is beneficial to both users and marketers. Instead of typing in a random assortment of letters and numbers, we soon could be entering a company slogan or a brand tagline. Microsoft, for example, will ask users to type in "Browse Safer" as part of an advertisement for Internet Explorer. Toyota may ask you to type in a new theme its pushing. Perhaps other companies will take advantage of your undivided attention by implanting corporate messages into your conscious: "I want a Pop Tart" or "Coors Light Does Not Taste Like Urine."

It's certainly more innovative than putting your logo on coeds' bottoms.

Massie calls this new Citizens for the Republic spot "effective and a nice echo of Reagan's famous Morning in America ad':

Will Wilkinson writes:

I think it is easy for some liberals to miss just how antagonising flip mockery of absurd religious beliefs can be, though it’s hard to believe they don’t, at some level, grasp what’s at stake. To laugh at someone’s views on the evils of masturbation or witchcraft or gay marriage is clearly to imply that these views, and the people who hold them, deserve to be laughed at and, thereby, diminished.

It is easy to believe that Fox News is so popular among conservatives simply because it caters to their prejudices. But another way of saying almost the same thing is to say that it treats conservatives with the respect they feel they deserve; it asserts on their behalf a claim to social status that acknowledges the efforts of liberals to weaken that claim, all the while encouraging pride in the identity-constituting affiliations and convictions liberals seem to disdain.

That’s an apt description of the impression Fox News gives its audience. But a network that so regularly misleads its viewers about the truth is not actually treating them with respect. If CNN were able to express respect for Fox’s audience, while avoiding the lies and propaganda of its rival, it could do a lot better.

Jamelle Bouie says that I’m not “making any sense” here. Drum makes a version of the same argument:

Democrats basically had a filibuster-proof majority for about three months. That’s just not very long.

Bernstein is slightly less forgiving:

I think complaints about DADT or DREAM Act (could have been done quickly enough as stand-alone bills or added to something else) are a lot more legitimate than complaints about comprehensive immigration or energy/climate.  There just wasn’t the time for those two. 

Of course, the next question is whether it’s reasonable to blame the Dems (or Barack Obama in particular) because they couldn’t hold their last couple of votes, or because they made an error in assuming they would hold Ted Kennedy’s seat and thus had plenty of time to work through their agenda.  I’m a bit agnostic on this, specifically on DADT repeal.  On the one hand, I thought that Obama’s take-it-slow, build-a-consensus strategy was a smart one; indeed, I still think repeal is more likely by 2012 than if Obama made it a priority item in spring 2009, without doing the groundwork at the Pentagon, and lost. 

But it took Obama over a year to begin a year-long Pentagon review. If he had acted sooner, the review would have been done in time for the vote. Jonathan continues:

On the other hand, I do understand the frustration of repeal supporters.  One of the dangers of coalition politics, or party politics, is that your issue will wind up further down the list of coalition priorities than you would like, and I think that’s certainly the case here in a sense: surely, if DADT repeal was as important to the Democrats as passing health care or the stimulus, then it would have passed.  Beyond that, things get murky…it’s awful hard to know whether one’s group would be better off threatening to bolt (or actually bolting), and when it’s best to charge ahead and try to move up the priority list by demonstrating loyalty and the ability to bring assets to the party. 

Well, we sure tried both – see HRC’s fellatial treatment of Obama last fall and the subsequent march for equality the next day. For the gays, nothing works. The Dems really really really don’t give a shit about us, just about our money.

For goodness sake. If one were to list the problems in the Texas education system in order of urgency "turning out students with a pro-Islamic, anti-Christian bias" would come right after "exciting topography overstimulating student drivers in panhandle."

There is now a "cyber super weapon" designed to destroy a specific real-world target, The Christian Science Monitor reports in a fascinating piece:

The cyber worm, called Stuxnet, has been the object of intense study since its detection in June. As more has become known about it, alarm about its capabilities and purpose have grown. Some top cyber security experts now say Stuxnet's arrival heralds something blindingly new: a cyber weapon created to cross from the digital realm to the physical world – to destroy something.

At least one expert who has extensively studied the malicious software, or malware, suggests Stuxnet may have already attacked its target – and that it may have been Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, which much of the world condemns as a nuclear weapons threat.

If you try and keep straight all the details of Sarah Palin’s stories about the birth of Trig, you’ll go crazy. (I know, right?) But now, in a recent speech – start listening to her Trig story at around 14:00 – she has shifted the actual place of the birth of Trig, from Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Wasilla to Anchorage, 40 miles away. She also claims that Internet bloggers claimed her pregnancy only lasted two weeks. In fact, the first person to make a quip on those lines put it this way:

“I was only pregnant a month.”

Edinburgh, Indiana, 6.57 am

This anecdote, far more than the Tea Parties, sums up the mainstream American attitude toward politics this year:

Steve Nicholson barely opens the storm door for the Democratic campaign volunteer trying to talk to him about the Ohio governor's race. "I don't care for either one," he says, "I just want jobs." The volunteer says that's exactly why he should vote for the incumbent, Democrat Ted S­­­trickland. "Not voting is a vote for Kasich," she says, referring to Republican challenger John Kasich. "Strickland will be better for jobs," agrees Nicholson, 30. So will he vote? No. Does he at least want a little campaign literature to learn about the race? No. The storm door closes.