Aruspicy

It has apparently become conventional wisdom that whoever Obama picks as VP, it can't possibly be anyone who has already been assigned a speakers slot at the convention. The reasoning, as far as I can divine it, goes like this:

1. There is a speaking slot reserved for the VP.
2. No person could conceivably speak twice at the Democratic convention.
3. Thus, anyone already assigned to a speakers slot is ipso facto not going to be the VP nominee.

I call bullshit.

In the first place, I don't see any reason why someone couldn't speak twice. It would be a departure from what has been done in the past. So what?

But there's also a covert assumption here that strikes me as pretty implausible. That assumption is that the speaking schedule could not possibly be modified. But why couldn't it be? No reason that I can see.

As a matter of fact, it seems to me that the conventional wisdom has the significance of the schedule precisely backwards. When I look at the speaker's schedule, what it suggests to me is that the pick is likely to be Biden, Bayh, or maybe even Richardson. This is because all three are already set to speak on the same day the VP nominee address is scheduled. Which means, among other things, that moving any of them into the VP speaking slot wouldn't require much schedule shuffling.

Four more wars! Four more wars!

From the fever swamp:

1) Russian officers are drunk, slow, lazy thieves and are no match for any Western professionals. Their relative success is due purely to Georgian military incompetence, like the failure to block the roads and organize tank ambushes in the mountainous terrain perfectly suited for such operations. Even so, the Georgians managed to down several Russian aircraft and that should present a clear picture of the pathetic condition of the Russian air force.

2) The current Kremlin dwarfs (whichever one is really in charge) are no Hitlers or Stalins, but paper pushers who won the lottery and who, most likely, will not risk a real military confrontation with the West. They will however continue probing to sense weaknesses and to search for small victorious engagements to entertain the revenge hungry masses.

Addendum: Relatedly, you may have heard about wingnut efforts to turn this into another front on the war on terror. As often happens, Yglesias has the defninitive takedown:

In Iraq too, the Kremlin’s projection of power down through Georgia will soon be felt. Take another look at the map. If Russia is allowed to extend its reach southwards, as in Soviet times, down the Caucasus to Iran’s borders, Moscow can support Iran in any showdown with the West. Iran, thus emboldened, will likely attempt to reassert itself in Iraq, Syria and, via Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

This is crazy and paranoid, but also ignorant. The former Soviet Republics of Central Asia already have friendly relations with Moscow — Georgia, the Baltics, and the current regime in Ukraine are trying to get out of the Russian orbit, but the ’stans largely aren’t. But beyond the specific details it’s the constant paranoia and hysteria of the right-wing that really comes through here — the entire American position in the world turns out to hang on the narrow thread of Georgia exercising effective sovereignty over South Ossetia and/or Mikhail Saakashvili’s ability to hold onto power in Tblisis. Nevermind that before he took office, nobody thought him taking power was especially vital to American interests (as opposed to, perhaps, the citizens of Georgia’s interest in democratic elections) or that it’s not clear why the fact that Georgia touches Iran would magically alter the nature of the US-Iran-Russia relationships. |Yglesias|

As I indicated above, this all seems correct. The only thing that I would add is that it's important not to underestimate the strategic vision of the neocons. Consider what would happen if, once a fairly durable cease-fire had been established, the U.S. used this opportunity to negotiate a deal with Georgia to base American troops there. Like magic, Iran and Russia would find that their security concerns suddenly dovetail. Rising tensions would, naturally, be taken as evidence that the neocons were right all along.

Medal counts

First thing first. The medal count, as a practice, is straight up stupid and nobody should pay any attention to it. That said, contra Bob Costas, the fact that the China has won only one more total medals than the USA (32-31) would only indicate that the medal count is close in cases where China had not won twice as many (20-10) gold medals.

Oh, Canada

Switched over to CBC for men's gymnastics because NBC's coverage was so jingoistic and heard this about a Canadian gymnast, "he's having a great competition, scored 15 on the vault, which was a higher score than some of the other athletes."

Smart game Wednesday

This is pretty fun.

The human drama of athletic competition

My standard Olympic complaint usually applies no matter who buys the rights to the coverage. It goes like this:

The Olympics is an incredible sports festival. There are enough sporting events, in fact, that whichever network buys the rights could fill their entire schedule for the duration of the Olympics with nothing but coverage of sporting events. Instead, what we get is hour after hour of fluffy human interest stories with the occasional event final thrown in if there's a chance that an American might win. I understand that there are people who tune in to watch that sort of thing, and I don't generally have a problem with those sorts of people having access to their preferred flavor of drivel, but goddammit, the Olympics are a sporting event and the focus ought to be on the constant variety of sports.

Not mentioned, but maybe implicit, in this critique is the thought that the conventions of Olympic broadcasting made a lot more sense before the cable age. When most everyone was limited to three or four channels, it made sense for the networks to pander to the common denominator among their potential audience. Sports fans would tune in because at the end of the day its the Olympics. The problem for the networks was to attract those viewers who would as soon see the opening scenes of Heidi as watch the final moments of an athletic competition.

For the last 20 years, though, pandering to the common denominator has been a recipe for irrelevance. The explosion in the number of channels, even on basic cable, means that narrowly targeting a particular audience is a better strategy for success than is trying to be unobjectionable to all viewers.

Which brings me to the fact that the coverage of this Olympics seems to be different. I'm sure it's partly due to time zones, and 25% due to the fact that I live in a border state, but my experience so far is that there are always at least two, and often as many as four, channels broadcasting the Olympics. Of those four, only NBC ever runs those puff pieces. Right now, at 3:30am, I've got a choice between swimming on NBC and whitewater canoeing on USA. CBC and MSNBC were, until 3, also providing coverage. Naturally, I'm watching Starship Troopers.

Obama and O.J.: Here we go

In today's edition of Great Moments in Wingnut America, D.R. Tucker says that--win or lose--having a black man on the ticket will be kinda like when O.J. was declared not guilty. 

Seriously. 

Monday morning politics

I didn't mention it at the time, but I was struck by something about Obama's response to McCain during the tire pressure dust up. Here's what Obama had to say:



The punditocracy got a good laugh out of the proud-to-be-ignorant remark, and of course this sparked another round of backlash rope-a-dope^[1], but what really got my attention was that Obama used the L word. Just before getting into his explicit defense of the idea of inflating your tires, Obama says, "One, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is."

And then, this weekend, the Obama camp released this web video which goes through a McCain attack ad point by point before reaching the conclusion that, "In short, this ad is a lie."

It seems to me that this is a watershed, and I'm surprised that it hasn't been remarked upon. In 2004, some members of the Democratic base called on the Kerry campaign to make an issue of the pervasive dishonesty of the GOP machine, but they were roundly rejected. Tom Friedman even went so far as to write a column arguing that liberals should avoid calling Bush a liar because doing so would coarsen our political discourse and undermine the electorate's trust in government. I disagreed with Friedman then, and nothing since has changed my mind.

It's refreshing to see the Obama campaign break from past practice here. For too long, Democrats have let the pundit class talk them into trying to fight the GOP slime machine with sugar, spice, and comity. I don't know that it's necessary for the Obama campaign to climb all the way down into the mud^[2] in order to win, but they do need to at least make sure that the low road has speed bumps. It looks like they're ready to do that.

----------
1 -- Holbo's must-read post does a good job of identifying and explaining this strategy. Holbo is talking specifically about race card rope-a-doping, but his point seems generalizable.

2 -- Unless, that is, framing McCain as old, cranky, and out of touch counts as dirty politics.

Women's ten meter air rifle

Really?

Fencing

Item: Zagunis!

Item: I can't help but wonder: do those fencing masks filter the air at all?

Item: Fencing is one of those sports that it's best to get out of the way early, don't you think?

Item: Coincidentally, I assume, just this evening I found myself wondering how the epee could possibly have found its way into any nation's armory.

Item: Jacobson is the Monica Seles of fencing.

Item: Oh. I guess everybody is the Monica Seles of fencing. My bad.

Item: Apparently, the announcers are required to say, "Jacobson is very analytical. A Yale graduate" once per match. Anyone surprised to learn that our best fencers are Yale graduates? Howzabout, anyone surprised to learn that our best fencers are the children of Yale graduates?

Item: Not for nothing, I think fencers are among the last true amateurs.

Maybe 100 years

"Foolishly she continues to try to assert her control over the remote. This is a battle that will continue for a long time."

- John McCain, on control.

Dumb game Thursday

Zombie survival quiz. I would survive, apparently. How about you?

Bachelor living

I think I learned how to make a new sound this morning.

... and they remain eternally intertwined.

via egg

The race card card

An interesting sequence of events. First, the McCain Campaign, in the context of a week long ad blitz that has been demonstrably deceptive on each of its major themes, unleashes an ad that invites viewers to associate Obama with young white women who are famous for being overhyped, vapid, and sexually promiscuous. Second, it immediately becomes conventional wisdom that it would be the purest fantasy to suggest that the creators of the ad might have cynically chosen imagery that played to the repressed racist core of the GOP's wingnut base. Third, Obama, while discussing the McCain campaign's descent into the mud, remarks that, "They're going to try to say that I'm a risky guy, they're going to try to say, 'Well, you know, he's got a funny name and he doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills." Fourth, the McCain Campaign announces that Obama has "played the race card." Fifth, it is immediately accepted as conventional wisdom that Obama has played the race card and that this is a very bad thing which must be admitted and repudiated.

Addendum: And now I'm watching Clarence Page on MSNBC and he's being riduculed for suggesting that the McCain ad has racial overtones. Meanwhile, it continues to be taken as obvious that 'looks like a president' has clear racial content.

Double Plus Addendum: Holy crap! Page may have won the argument.

(image via)

An important internet survival skill for the future

If you don't like something online, just don't look at it. Web celebs, trolls, trashy blogs, and Web 2.0 blowhards run on attention and if they're denied that, they'll go away.

The link is to Kottke, which should know about these things, and, by the way, is where I first ran across buzzfeed.

Seriously fantastic news: solar power for everything

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon."
...
The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to work. It's so easy to implement," he said.
...
Nocera hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

Maybe time to start selling oil short?

(link, via boingboing and every other website I visited this morning)