Month: May 2012

Subtler than it seems, if you listen long enough:

Larison counters Christie boosterism:

Christie might initially generate enthusiasm and give Romney a brief boost, but he would become an electoral liability before the end. This is also the same man who repeatedly said that he wasn’t ready to be President as recently as last year. A year later, he’s suddenly well-prepared and ready to take over in an emergency because he had a few photo-ops in Israel?

Christie has absolutely no foreign policy experience, which compounds one of Romney’s main weaknesses. The attack ads practically write themselves. Choosing Christie would be akin to attaching a time bomb to the Romney campaign. 

Massie tires of all the veep speculation:

[T]his is a Washington parlour game that, though traditional and much-enjoyed, is generally less important than the acres of newsprint devoted to it would have you believe. It is most unlikely to determine the result of the election, no matter how much anyone triies to persuade you otherwise.

I really cannot bring myself to think about this yet. I put it down to Palin Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Via the Mouth of Sauron, I see the chosen scapegoat for this disaster is social conservatives. Of course: wapo.st/KoVDTU

— Joshua Treviño (@jstrevino) May 1, 2012

Breaking the Grenell story appears to have been the last straw for some Republicans. William Jacobson launches into Rubin:

The Romney campaign was happy to use Rubin, as she often bragged about speaking with this or that source at the campaign, and Romney even granted her an “exclusive” interview. But she can’t seem to stop whatever holy war she has going on, and it’s coming back to bite the Romney campaign big time because Rubin ran a screaming headline yesterday over the resignation of Romney adviser Richard Grenell.

Erick Erickson, who already didn't like her, is the most vicious. He imagines a dialogue between Grenell and Rubin:

Richard: “Mittens didn’t pay enough attention to me so I quit. And do you know wwhhhhyyyyyyyy he didn’t? Bryan. Yes, that’s right Bryan Fischer from Mr. Perkins’s class. Mittens is too interested in what Bryan Fischer thinks.”

Jenn: “Really?! Well, we shall have to let Sally, Sarah, and Susan know what Mittens did to you. How dare he think he can use us. Oh, I know, we can get on the internet and tell everybody our side of the story first. Of course they’ll believe us. Why would they believe those dweebs?!”

Richard: “Oh Jenn, you rock!”

Jenn: “Oh Richard, you rock too! Let’s get this done quick before General Hospital comes on.”

I didn't realize that Erickson was homophobic. Now I do. Casting Ric and Rubin as schoolgirls (or a teen gay and his female friend) is a classic of the genre. But Erickson is also wrong in his post, in trying to make this an issue about Grenell's tweets. Read today's NYT reported story and you'll find that Rubin was right, that my post last night was right, and that this was indeed a major moment when Romney's total capitulation to the theocon, Christianist right was shining brightly in the sunlight.

Anne Kreamer worries about the overuse of headphones in the workplace:

Isaac Kohane, co-director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, has studied if and how scientists benefit from close physical adjacencies at work. Even though scientific research obviously has been enhanced by internet connectedness (the web, after all, began 23 years ago as a vehicle for scientific collaboration), Kohane and his researchers found "striking evidence for the role of physical proximity as a predictor of the impact of collaborations." As Kyungjoon Lee, a research assistant on the study put it, "science is all about communicating your ideas so others can build on them." It seems obvious to me that not just science but most professional pursuits significantly benefit from this kind of perpetual accidental physical-world collaboration. But as my interviews revealed, when we put on our headphones and fire up our messenger client of choice, we effectively make ourselves remote telecommuters even when we are physically present.

He spent yesterday trying to bring around the fire-breathing conservative new media. Weird how he seems to be ignoring another critical media constituency entirely:

A full year after Romney launched his presidential bid, the campaign doesn't have a Spanish version of its website, nor has it hired a Spanish-speaking spokesperson. Romney boycotted a primary debate on Univision, leading to the event's collapse, and, to date, he has only done one sit-down interview on a national Spanish network. The apparent apathy has left Latino advocates — and more than a few Republicans — baffled, wondering whether the campaign has already written off one of the fastest-growing demographics in the country.

Many readers can relate to this post. William Smith writes:

Anyone named Wesley Snipes (under 40 or so) or Robert DeNiro (who's under 70 years old) is just asking for it.  Consider a nickname or a change of name or your middle name, if possible.  Try being named something simple, Will Smith or something really common like that.  That's where the suckage really begins because it's both common and famous.  I doubt half the people in high school knew my first name, since I was "Fresh +/- Prince" or even "FP" for short.  And yes, I am very white. Kinda sucked and when I went to college, adopted my nickname.  In short, I am rarely known by my real name, which I actually prefer.

John Coulter writes:

I married a woman with the first name Anne back in 1997.

(We just celebrated our 15th anniversary). Being a liberated woman, she did not take my last name: Coulter. A few years later, she started softening her stance on changing her surname to mine. About that time, THE Ann Coulter burst on the scene and gave her an excuse to never change it.

John Phillip Sousa writes:

I wrote an essay [pdf] about being named John Phillip Sousa.

Michael Sheard writes:

The "well-known" person with whom I share a name – the late British character actor – isn't all that famous, but he does have a famous image.  He played Adolf Hitler in several movies and TV shows, most notably Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  So if you use Google Images to try to find a picture of me, usually the first thing that pops up is a picture of (an actor dressed as) Hitler.

(Note: All readers waived the Dish's anonymity policy to use their real names, for obvious reasons.)

 

A reason Obama wins the youth vote:

Perhaps because Obama’s strength among young voters was first evident in Iowa, an extremely white state, discussions of race and age are generally held separately. Obama certainly did better among young whites than their parents and grandparents (54% among young whites v. 41% among all other whites), but much of Obama’s exceptional performance among young voters was due to the larger share of non-white voters. Indeed, even if Obama did as poorly among young whites as he did among whites over 30, Obama still would have won 58% of the youth vote. So long as non-white voters continue to offer overwhelming support for Democrats, the youth vote can be expected to offer overwhelming support for Democrats, as well.

"If anything, I would move up the timeline for 
transitioning security responsibility to the Afghans. They 
simply must be made to feel the pressure of winning this war—their
 war— sooner rather than later," – Roger Carstens, architect of the Afghanistan counter-insurgency strategy.

A challenge for carnivores and vegetarians alike:

For those committed to reducing animal suffering, the intentional creation of headless or preferably anencephalic animals for food is preferable to the status quo. Those who find creating such animals objectionable but who support factory farming should ask why their own sense of unease or disgust outweighs the suffering inflicted on animals to satisfy their carnivorous palates?

Why don't Americans use electric bicycles?

After all, they run on a battery inside the frame, which has a range of roughly 30 miles on a full charge. They’re very clean–no gas combusted–amazingly efficient, and can go almost as fast as a moped, up to 20 miles per hour. And they can flatten hills that make grown men weep.

Their scarcity is partly due to confusing state laws: 

[E]-bikes do not fit neatly into existing legal categories, in some places they’re banned altogether. The problem is that, legally, the bikes aren’t motorized vehicles, so they’re not allowed to operate as a car or motorcycle would. But they can’t be registered as bikes, either. The solution to that conundrum so far has been to ban e-bikes. New York state, for instance, has decided that electric bikes cannot be ridden on public streets, sidewalks, or parking lots.

In New York City, fines for riding e-bikes are in the process of doubling to $1,000:

Admittedly, electric bikes don’t travel safely in bike lanes (they’re faster than most bicycles) or in the street (they still only do about 20MPH and don’t have good acceleration). But just like we allow people to drive cars that are capable of driving three-to-four-times faster than we typically allow in the city, why not simply ticket electric bike riders who break the speed limit? Or create a speed limit for bike lanes?

(Photo: a British model from 1947 in Mechanix Magazine by Carlton Reid)