Month: August 2011

Tom Bissell praises iPad gaming:

[A] really fine iPad game offers an experience in which many of the impurities of console gaming are boiled away. Many of these pure games – less grandly known as  "gamey games" – have little of the narrative ambition (or, to put it less kindly, bloat) typical to console games and, as a consequence, don't bother trying to push the same emo-cognitive buttons. They get in your head, to be sure, but through different passageways.

Another way of saying this is that console games do everything in their power to form a relationship with you, which can be great and rewarding and, just as often, aggravating and tedious. iPad games, on the other hand, are like someone you meet in a bar and find yourself screwing in the bathroom 10 minutes later. This is not a criticism.

On Angry Birds:

Angry Birds is, of course, a puzzler (also a torment machine), and like all great puzzlers it mixes an unexpected conceit with a pleasing aesthetic world and complicates simple goals with the friction force of straightforward physical laws. Anyone who maintains that video games make you dumber could stand to play a couple of good puzzlers. Whether the form of intelligence exercised and strengthened by puzzlers has any practical application outside of playing puzzlers is another question. Until I find myself in a situation that requires slingshotting large objects at fixed positions, I withhold judgment.

(Image: From a collection of superhero mashups)

Tom Jensen thinks so:

We have looked at the generic ballot 11 times going back to the beginning of March and Democrats have been ahead every single time, by an average margin of about 4 points. This 7 point advantage is the largest Democrats have had and if there was an election today I'm think that they'd take back the House.

Chait wonders why more people aren't thinking like Jensen. Two words: learned helplessness. My money is on a Democratic House and a chastened Republican Senate in 2013. Gallup analysis here. My reason for the shift: the staggering recklessness of the GOP in recent months. It goes hand in hand with Obama's turn-around against a generic Republican.

"Chalk one up to the crazies. If Congress wanted to get rid of tax exemptions and exclusions amounting to $100 billion in new taxes in exchange for $1 trillion in tax cuts, and Republicans turned the deal down, I would personally drive down to Washington and pelt them with rotten vegetables, and possibly with rocks. $100 billion in new taxes plus $1 trillion in cuts balances the budget in 2012," - Kevin Williamson, NRO.

A reader makes an essential point:

MLK didn’t run for office.

Another makes several:

First of all, King was not a politician.  He was not elected to represent diversity.  Rather, he was a Baptist minister.  Secondly, one of King's major influences was a Hindu leader, Gandhi.  King's views were not held in a vacuum, but were influenced by ideas outside of his own belief system.  He marched with Jews and Catholics, arm in arm. 

Lastly, one of the main points of King's invocation of Christian virtues was to shame his white, Christian listeners.  His repeated reminders about Christian charity and brotherhood were an attempt to force white Southerners to look in the mirror, and to live up to their own proclaimed beliefs. 

The Christianist, as I understand him or her, is out to force all to abide by their narrow interpretation of Christian morality, be they believer or unbeliever.  King was tapping into the belief system of the South; the Christianist would impose that belief system from above.  That is a major distinction.

My thoughts here.

In the theocon's arguments last night, he cited Abraham Lincoln as saying that no state has the right to do wrong, as part of an argument that moral laws he supports should be mandatory on all US citizens, regardless of the tenth amendment, or their own state's preferred policy. His specific quote was: "The states do not have the right to do wrong." Santorum has used this quote before. Andrew Malcolm does his best to save him:

Actually, it's "No one has the right to choose to do what is wrong," widely attributed (particularly by those in the antiabortion movement) to Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, supposedly said in response to Douglas' assertion that slave owners had the right to choose to own slaves, which was another fight rooted in the 10th Amendment.

From this record of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln: 

I suppose that in reference both to [the] actual existence [of slavery] in the nation, and to our constitutional obligations, we have no right at all to disturb it in the States where it exists, and we profess that we have no more inclination to disturb it than we have the right to do it. We go further than that; we don’t propose to disturb it where, in one instance, we think the Constitution would permit us …

So I say again, that in regard to the arguments that are made, when Judge Douglas says he “don’t care whether slavery is voted up or voted down,” whether he means that as an individual expression of sentiment, or only as a sort of statement of his views on national policy, it is alike true to say that he can thus argue logically if he don’t see anything wrong in it; but he cannot say so logically if he admits that slavery is wrong.

He cannot say that he would as soon see a wrong voted up as voted down. When Judge Douglas says that whoever or whatever community wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical, if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.

A mite subtler a debating point than Santorum's blanket hostility to any states' rights to veer away from what he sees as the eternal truths of Catholic natural law.

Salem, New York, 3.20 pm

Confirmed by his spokesman. Ed Kilgore traces the path that led to the Texas Christianist entering as frontrunner:

In keeping with the extraordinary timing that has charmed his entire political career, Rick Perry seems to perfectly embody the Republican zeitgeist of the moment, appealing equally to the GOP’s Tea Party, Christian Right, and establishment factions while exemplifying the militant anti-Obama attitude that holds it all together. He offers the Republican Party an opportunity for unity at a time when his only rival in this respect is the underwhelming Tim Pawlenty, whose once-promising campaign could quite possibly expire this next weekend in the heat and noise of the GOP straw poll in Ames, Iowa. And unlike T-Paw, Perry has the ability to forcefully project the talking-points of various GOP factions in a way that seems authentic, no matter how often he contradicts himself. It’s a rare gift, possessed by his one-time boss George W. Bush, and even more famously by—though the comparison may seem blasphemous—Ronald Reagan himself.

Michael Linden catches the GOP economic adviser in a contradiction:

If we apply the same [Holtz-Eakin] methodology to the entire lifespan of the Recovery Act, not just to 2009, the multiplier becomes even more impressive. The total cost of the stimulus bill was about $800 billion, delivered over the course of two years. The difference between actual GDP through the first quarter of 2011 and what GDP would have been had it continued “falling off a cliff” is around $3.3 trillion—implying a multiplier of more than 4.

Graphs after the jump:

A reader writes:

I agree with nearly everything stated in your live-blogging as well as the reax from the right, except for this point by Jonah Goldberg that you agreed with:

Not only has Fox News — the supposed mouthpiece of the GOP — put on a far, far, far better debate than CNN did (or MSNBC could),  it has subjected the GOP contenders to tougher, rougher, questions than any debate I can remember. In fact, I don’t think Obama ever received this kind of grilling as a candidate or as president.

True, CNN and MSNBC would not have done better. But Gingrich's complaint about "gotcha" questions was, sadly, dead on.  The candidates do have a lot of answer for, and many have said or done ridiculous things in the past.  And yet with the a trailing economy and millions of unemployed, the moderators preferred to play Socratic games with the candidates rather than get some real answers on matters of substanative policy. The economy and job creation were discussed very little last night, and the moderators would have done well to spend less time seeking to embarrasing the candidates with past gaffes, and instead hold their feet to the fire on real and specific policy proposals to move the economy forward.

Chait, Westen and Zakaria have it out on Charlie Rose.