The Great Frantic Novel

A contest to write a 50,000 word novel … in a month. At least the organizers are honest:

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Now the scary part: 13,000 people completed the task last year.

Words, Words, Words

3561_4 The word association to my left comes from the latest Pew survey. Mark Blumenthal comments:

I am struck by the remarkable the degree to which Democrats see Clinton as "tough" and "smart," but give Obama points for "energetic" and "optimistic."Note the way this data dovetails with the apparent strategies of the two campaigns: This week Obama releases a new ad that embraces hope, optimism and bipartisanship. Meanwhile, Clinton releases a health care plan reflecting her "smart, pragmatic" side and, as Andrew Sullivan reminds us, "calls Cheney Darth Vader."

Snobbery and Christianity

John McCain’s sudden decision to call himself a Baptist (everyone thought he was an Episcopalian) has reverberated a little in the South:

I don’t care whether Republican presidential candidate John McCain is an Episcopalian or a Baptist.

But the implication in Monday’s paper that he’d been caught at something — outed while trying to pass as an Episcopalian — hit a nerve.

Why do we diss Baptists?

Four Hours (Or So) Left

The movie line contest ends at 5 pm today, and I hope to post the winners pretty soon thereafter. Our crack team of, er, Jessie, will be be adding it up because I am mathematically challenged. You can check the latest results in the five lists of ten here, here, here, here and here. You still have time to put your favorite over the top. Vote late and vote often.

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"If we’ve learned anything from the debacle of the last six years, it’s that managing the government and getting it to do even the most basic tasks competently should not be under-estimated as a task."

No.

If there’s one thing we have learned from the debacle of the last six years, it is that the ability to run a tight political campaign has absolutely NOTHING TO DO with the ability to run the government.  Bush’s greatest detractors would not deny that he and Rove know how to bulldoze their political opponents; when it comes to running a campaign, they are competent at tasks both basic and advanced.

But we now know that this skill-set is just entirely divorced from the skill-set of running the country. Bush has shown that he has no idea of how to do that, in affairs domestic or international.  And his skill at campaigning has been a positive hindrance to his ability to perform his constitutional tasks.

It would be over-reaction to say that we should look for someone who runs a lousy campaign, in the hopes that they will care more about the country’s business than their party’s.  But even that would be more accurate than saying that we should closely scrutinize a campaign’s efficiency in order to see whether the candidate is competent to govern.