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This comes via a friend over email:

How many Sarah Palin’s does it take to screw in a lightbulb>

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Sexist! How dare you laugh at a joke about screwing Sarah Palin!

My brother and the Obama team in VA is doing some work:

With time running out on its push to register thousands of new voters in Virginia, the Obama campaign is picking up the pace. State election officials told the campaign Friday that 49,000 new voters signed up in August, a sharp increase from the 36,500 who signed up in July and the 28,000 who registered in June.

Also, a disclosure. My wife is now working for the Obama campaign. If it was another reporter covering the campaign, I’d want to know if his or her spouse were actually on the campaign. So I thought I should tell you.

David Roberts says it better than I could have.

One of the most bizarre spectacles in modern politics is watching the Republican Party attempt to reverse engineer the Chris Matthews/Hillary Clinton-in-New-Hampshire-moment as a means of stoking some kind of feminist backlash in favor of their extreme-right-wing, Eagle-Forum friendly, pro-life, creationist candidate. The same one who called Hillary Clinton a whiner when she pointed out the sexism of the coverage she faced.

Really feels like we’re through the culture-war looking glass at this point.

From my friend BC:

Dear Baseball Gods,

Just wanted to let you know that I am well aware that since I wrote an email last Friday proclaiming that “this team is fucking invincible,” the Cubs have not won a game. So, yeah, I get it: Everything is contingent, there are no fixed stars, therefore but the grace of God, etc., etc. Message received, valuable life-lesson learned, and I hereby promise not to get too high or too low on this team from here on out. So there’s no need for you to keep fucking with the Cubbies, or hurt my favorite player in all the world; you’ve proved your point and I pledge to approach both baseball and life in general with more humility. Okay? We cool now?

Yours in equanimity,

BC

I’m in the Twin Cities, blogging the RNC over at Capitolism. You can follow my dispatches here

Alan Jacobs makes a pretty excellent point :

ou could make the argument that this is the first election fully to bear the marks of a reality TV world, of Oprah and Survivor and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. And also the Olympics, at least as presented by NBC. We’re perhaps more accustomed than we ever have been to hearing Fascinating and Dramatic Life Stories, stories filled with Conflict and Tension and Obstacles Overcome, preferably in exotic settings — like, you know, Hawaii, or Alaska, or Vietnam, or Scranton. Biden has the bankrupted father, the upbringing in poverty, the stutter, the horrific accident that killed his wife and daughter; McCain has the . . . well, you know all about that; Obama has the — well, you totally know all about that; and now here comes Sarah Palin, just your typical snowmobile-racing, moose-hunting, basketball-playing, beauty-contest-entering-and-almost-winning member of the NRA and Feminists for Life with five kids, one of whom has Down’s syndrome. Other forms of reality TV will never catch up. Looks like the political is the personal — maybe from here on out.

Scott McLemee smartly points out that with the recent conflict with Georgia and Russia, another one of Thomas Friedman’s sterling insights about globalization has been tossed into the dustbin of history:

One minor casualty of the recent conflict in Georgia was the doctrine of peace through McGlobalization — a belief first elaborated by Thomas Friedman in 1999, and left in ruins on August 8, when Russian troops moved into South Ossetia. “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s,” wrote Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). ... McDonald’s opened in Russia in 1990 — a milestone of perestroika, if ever there were one. And Georgia will celebrate the tenth anniversary of its first Micky D’s early next year, assuming anybody feels up for it. So much for Friedman’s theory. Presumably it could be retooled ex post facto (“two countries with Pizza Huts have never had a thermonuclear conflict,” anyone?) but that really seems like cheating.

Hey there loyal readers. Sorry for my absence. I was on a much-needed vacation. This week and next I’ll be blogging from the conventions over at my Nation blog Capitolism. I’ll try to cross-post, but not sure I’ll be able to with spotty internet connections and such, so why not mosey on over to the Nation (and make my web editor happy)

Do not buy. It’s a buggy piece of crap. Seriously. More TK.

UPDATE: This about sums it up.

Smeared if you don’t:

What the McCain campaign doesn't want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that's political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.

All campaigns are a little dishonest, but McCain campaign is really outdoing itself.

There’s a whole lot of New Republic bashing in the center-left blogosphere, some of which is perfectly justified, some of which seems a bit excessive and baby-and-the-bathwater-esque. But for a little while now they’ve seen fit to employ and publish a writer named Jamie Kirchick, who is essentially a concern troll, a neo-con performance artist of the written word who lives off of baiting other writers into feuds by mis-characterizing their work and accusing them of being appeasers or anti-semites. My colleague Eric Alterman had to correct the record recently in response to Kirchick smearing him over his views on Israel.

There’s really no point in wasting any time arguing with the guy. There’s nothing there to interact with. But Kirchick’s not really the issue, as Ezra rightly points out here. There’ll always be a market for dishonesty and viciousness in print. Some of it’s even entertaining in a grim kind of way. The question is why the The New Republic chooses to continue to associate themselves with it.

(cross-posted)

Ben Smith says I’m “yawning” at McCain’s $520 loafers. I can see why he said that. My post on the topic was excessively arch.

So let me take off my irony hat and say this earnestly:

John McCain is an insanely rich individual. He is insanely rich because he married a woman who was insanely rich, who in turn inherited that insane wealth from her parents. They own more houses than I have pairs of shoes. Seriously. They have a super fancy credit cards that they carry a $225,000 balance on. He wears expensive shoes. I’m sure his suits and ties cost a lot, too. Whatever. That is what it is.

But, importantly, John McCain simply has no connection to working people on a personal level, and most likely hasn’t for most of his political life. The only working class people he encounters are those who come to his campaign events, those who serve him at restaurants, and the small army no doubt employed to clean his ten houses. And, more importantly, he’s the head of a political coalition that while managing to win millions of working class votes, does not have any real representatives of working America calling the shots in the party’s upper echelons. His top economic adviser spent his entire career trying to stick it to the middle class and enrich the banking industry, which he later lucratively joined. Now that the very policies he pushed for helped create a massive ponzi scheme that is collapsing on the heads of the middle class he sniffs at the rubble and calls those people whiners. Whiners.

Now, if John McCain’s policies were crafted to aid working people, to restore some basic fairness to our economy at a time when inequality is undeniably growing, wages are stagnating and a perfect storm of disparate factors have blown lots of middle-class folks precariously close to the edge of real financial disaster, I wouldn’t really care that much about the fact that marrying a rich heiress has made him fabulously wealthy.

But John McCain’s policies have been crafted explicitly to enrich rich people like himself: he is going to take money from the government and put it in his wife’s bank account, and I mean that quite literally. (Look at this chart, via Matt Y) This has been the signature Bush/Norquist tax policy of the last eight years and the policy McCain wants to continue.

It is upwards redistribution. It is taking from the many and giving to the few. Under his plan you get a foreclosed home, an oil rig off the local public beach and some busted keds: he gets another house, another SUV and a shiny new pair of $520 Ferragamo loafers.

That may sound hyperbolic, but it’s true. My ironic point was that we have the perfect makings of a full-fledged campaign narrative here: you have a super rich guy who got super rich not through any of his own genius or hard work (obvious proviso here about his undeniable courage and heroism in Vietnam, but that has nothing to with his net wealth). This super wealthy guy who has married into a family of millionaires flits around in private jets to his many houses while campaigning on an economic policy that tells working people that the economy is great, and if they don’t think it’s great they’re whiners. Meanwhile he’s pushing a tax code that would make him, his wife and his rich donors much richer.

At what point does it begin to set in that this guy is just another business-as-usual, out-of-touch rich guy?

(cross-posted)

Honestly, the McCain campaign has become a kind of pathetic caricature of all of the worst elements of Rovian politics. This is their response to Obama’s response to their childish “celeb ad”. (I won’t dignify it with a link here):

This is a typically superfluous response from Barack Obama. Like most celebrities, he reacts to fair criticism with a mix of fussiness and hysteria," says McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, before trying to link the attack back to offshore drilling."

“Fussiness and hysteria.” Roll that one around on your tongue.

These people are not good people.

(cross-posted)

If I were a right-wing blogger, and I found out that Barack Obama was wearing Ferragamo loafers that cost $520, I would spend about 50% of my waking hours making sure everyone knew this. I would mock him for being an out-of-touch elitist and make jokes like, “If you think that’s a lot, you should see how much his purse costs ” I would send the link to Drudge and wait for Instapundit to pick it up, and then watch gleefully as Fox News ran segments about how Barack Obama’s $500 loafers vitiate his entire economic platform.

But of course, I’m not a right-wing blogger. And the $520 shoes belong to John McCain. And frankly, I don’t think how much his shoes cost matters one whit for how he’d govern the country.

(cross-posted)