You too will ask, "what the fuck was that sound?"

Predictions

This is a little late, but I have three predictions for the new year.

1) Too unpopular and inarticulate to make it on the public speaking scene, George W. Bush finds himself relegated to the Reno / Atlantic City / Dubai appearance circuit. The money is good, but so are the parties. Bush quickly and publicly hits bottom.

2) Bill Clinton announces his retirement from public life and returns to Harlem to write his memoir. He makes very little news for some time, but in July the New York Times reports on page one that Clinton has been conducting an affair with an intern from the National Enquirer.

3) "The Ex-Presidents", a mid-season replacement reality show following Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as they undergo treatment for, respectively, sex addiction and alcoholism, provides America with a much needed distraction. A movement is quickly begun to repeal the 22nd Amendment. As the measure is broadly popular, its failure to pass by December 2009 leads some to suggest that the Constitution ought to be further modified to allow for the ratification of amendments through the mechanism of cell phone text message voting.

The Keating thing

I'd bet dollars to donuts that the Obama campaign is hitting McCain about the Keating Five mostly to make sure that Angry John makes it to the debate tomorrow.

In other news, I've actually met Bill Ayers. He was one of several guests who came to an undergraduate seminar I taught called The Ethics of Dissent. As you would expect in such a setting, we spent a lot of our time talking about why Ayers thought the Weathermen were justified to engage in a campaign of political violence. Ayers told me that he and his associates had honestly believed that the United States was on the brink of erupting into an out and out race war. This, he pointed out, was a view shared by both Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. He ran through a list of left of center political figures and activists who had been assassinated during the sixties. JFK, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy, Medgar Evers. His point was pretty clear.

Unrelatedly, here's a two hour C-Span panel on Obama as a community organizer.

(unofficial) Palin debate predictions thread

The nature of the McCain campaign means that we've got to prepare for both stunt and non-stunt debate possibilities. My predictions are below. Yours are in comments.

Non-stunt prediction: Pundits will declare that Palin wins while losing and it won't be obvious that they're wrong. Up to a point, there's an upside to sputtering incomprehensible strings of buzzwords. Low information voters will make up a version of what you're saying that makes sense to them, and that narrative is apt to be more convincing than anything you might have come up with yourself. Another way of putting that is to say that low information voters aren't going to be familiar with any specifics you might come up with, so you're better off letting them connect the dots with examples from their own lives. The bar has never been all that high for Palin. She doesn't have to make sense. She just has to make about as much sense as a regulation issue Republican. Less maybe.

Stunt prediction: Monday at 8am Palin resigns as Governor of Alaska and issues a press release stating that she is bringing her team down. Tuesday, the McCain campaign, through Ed O'Callaghan in Alaska, issues an inscrutable press release stating that the campaign will henceforth cease advising Palin, limiting communication to such items as are necessary to coordinate actions. At the debate, Palin still doesn't know much about a disturbing range of issues, but is feisty, assertive, and coherent. Stakes out a far-right socially conservative agenda beyond anything McCain is proposing. Non-bible verse line of the night, "Well, John has his views and I have mine and we'll continue to negotiate."

Up with Jindal

It says here that he replaces Palin on the ticket.

Predictions

• By 2017, most new American sofas will include cupholders. Also, they will be much larger.
  
• In early June of 2008, Dick Cheney will declare himself to be a planet, thus restoring the Solar System to the traditional nine.
  
• The Rolling Stones will continue to tour.

Miscellaneous predictions

• Deal or No Deal will turn out not to have legs.
  
  
• Rather than continue to preside over a disastrous attempt to pacify Baghdad street by street, Robert Gates will resign as Secretary of Defence after less than six months.
  
  
• The Wii will blow the PS3 completely out of the water. Sony, emerging from bankruptcy in 2008, will enter into talks with Sega, Atari, and Electronic Arts focused on updating and endorsing the 3DO platform.
  
  
• Hillary Clinton will withdraw from the 2008 presidential race.
  
  
• Mark McGwire will not receive enough votes to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
  
  
• There will be a major terrorist strike somewhere in the world on the 11th day of some month. It will involve coordinated bombings of public transportation. If it's in the United States, nationwide standards will be adopted making it so inconvenient to use public transit that everyone will drive.
  
  
• The klezmer scene will continue not to expand.