Palin

I think this from Jack Cafferty (!) via Ezra sums it up:

"Let's suppose that that phone rings at 3am in the morning and either Joe Biden or Sarah Palin has to answer it. You tell me," continued Cafferty. "After this pick, ask yourself again who has the better judgment, John McCain or Barack Obama."

Constitutionless Convention

Dahlia Lithwick laments.

Best Piece about the convention thus far is...

Chris Beam follows Lanny Davis around. Most unexpected factoid: Lanny Davis is the father of CBS/SI college basketball reporter Seth Davis.

Who knew Antimatter was so expensive?

A fun chart from Marginal Revolution.

Anthony Lane

Is one of the best writers alive. See his New Yorker Olympics coverage here and here. A snippet:

The best thing about the shot put was the cars. After the shot landed, and the distance had been measured, the precious sphere would be retrieved by an official and placed in the cockpit of an automobile: two feet long, bright red, with a tail fin—in short, the idealized vehicle that I drew during chemistry lessons when I was nine years old. Now it exists, for real, and there are two Chinese fellows with the best job in the world, who get to steer it back to the shot-putting circle by remote control. (It can also bring a hammer, or even a javelin, which slots neatly into the fin.) I followed the gaze of the spectators around me, and realized that most of them had entirely lost interest in what was happening on the track, so urgently were they tracing the progress of the cars, and so hastily were they revising their list of what they want for Christmas. One question, though, will linger after the Games are done. The red supercars are equipped with windshields, but why? Who needs to see out? Are there tiny drivers tucked in there, bred specially for the event?

McCain's Agenda

Andrew Sullivan:

The agenda is war and the threat of war - including what would be an end to cooperation with Russia on securing loose nuclear materials and sharing terror intelligence, in favor of a new cold war in defense of ... Moldova and Azerbaijan. I'm sure McCain would like to have his Russian cooperation, while demonizing and attacking them on the world stage, but in the actual world, he cannot. Putin and Medvedev are not agreeable figures, and I do not mean in any way to excuse their bullying. But this is global politics, guys, and these are the cold, hard choices facing American policy makers.

And in this telling op-ed Lieberman and Graham simply do not even confront them. It's all about a moral posture, with no practical grappling with the consequences. It's the mindset that gave you the Iraq war - but multiplied.

John McCain is making it quite clear what his foreign policy will be like: tilting sharply away from the greater realism of Bush's second term toward the abstract moralism, fear-mongering and aggression of the first. Not just four more years - but four more years like Bush's first term. If the Democrats cannot adequately warn Americans of the dangers of a hotheaded temperament and uber-neo-con mindset in the White House for another four years, they deserve to lose. If Americans decide they want a president who will be more aggressive and less diplomatic than the current one, then they should at least brace for the consequences - for their economy and their security.

Newspapers vs. TV

Matt Yglesias reminds me of a point I want to make when he says this:

But that assumes that the cable networks are making some kind of good-faith attempt to inform their viewers and falling short, an assumption that I don’t think holds much water.

This is in contrast to newspapers, which (with the exception of tabloids like the New York Post, etc.) do make good-faith attempts to inform their readers and occasionally fall short. But too often, both liberals and conservatives group all TV networks and all newspapers together, when, really, each media organization should be considered separately.

Furthermore, it's important to remember that, at this point, TV networks drive news. The New York Times probably would have mentioned the Jeremiah Wright tapes twice (once in a story, once in a news analysis) if MSNBC/CNN/Fox hadn't been replaying the videos again and again and again. This is in contrast to the pre-CNN days, where newspapers (and the NYT and WaPo more specifically) drove news. Basically, a story would appear in the NYT in the morning and the nightly newscasts would follow up on it that night. However, today, this dynamic only exists locally, where newspapers break most of the news and then TV stations simply echo their reporting.

UPDATE: See Ezra Klein make this mistake. See TV. See newspaper. Also, see nifty internet.

+1 to David Brooks

I was going to quote David Brooks' column today, but then I realized my quote was going to be everything but the first paragraph. So read the whole thing. It's the best version of the "Goodbye to All That" thesis about Obama I've read.

The American Wanderer

Just wanted to spotlight this good piece on Obama and rootlessness from the New York Times. An interesting snippet:

But many presidents are shallow-rooted trees, even if they’re rarely perceived as drifters; far more often, “transplant,” with its connotation of re-rooting, is the unthreatening label they take on.

Ronald Reagan grew up in Tampico, Ill., wandered to Iowa and fell in as an announcer with the Chicago Cubs before heading to California. There he built one of the more enduring political personas of the 20th century. George W. Bush, Texas twang though he boasts, attended a blue-blood prep school in Massachusetts and summered in Maine, where the waters are chilly and the culture tight-lipped. Dwight Eisenhower was born in Texas, moved to Kansas and came to call Pennsylvania home. Herbert Hoover spent his 20s laboring in the outback of Australia and then China. Teddy Roosevelt strapped on a six-shooter and moved to the Dakotas, the better to fashion an image as the “cowboy” president, even though he was as New York as they come. Abraham Lincoln, the prototypical Illinoisan, was born in Kentucky and grew up impoverished in Indiana. He moved often as an adult, a loner before fate set him right.

Maps and Legends

It's a collection of essays by Michael Chabon, who is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. It contains extended defenses of various types of literature Chabon views as underappreciated (Sherlock Holmes, Comic Books), as well as some interesting memoir-like stuff. Recommended.