It’s often said that Democrats need to work harder to attract rural and suburban voters. As a campaign volunteer, I say: More urban voters. More apartment complexes. More row houses. Fewer front yards. Fewer side fences. Let the rich people with the long driveways figure out when the election is on their own.
I leave you with some wise words from the old people of Northeastern Philadelphia:
“I may burn in hell for it, but I think I’ll vote for Obama.”
“You keep knocking on my door and calling me by the wrong name! I’m sick of it! I’m not going to vote!”
Just because I don’t like to see gaps in the archives… Twitter has been doing an astonishingly good job gobbling up the raw dough of my thoughts before they become half-baked blog posts.
I’ve never seen a band try harder or better succeed at re-contextualizing rock and roll as a visceral experience and forcing an audience to respond in kind than Monotonix tonight at the Bowery Ballroom. We’re talking serious any-more-and-you’d-be-GG-Allin stuff, here. They got New York indie rock nerds to mosh. It looked something like this, only much more crowded:
Oddly, they were opening up for the Silver Jews, who were resolutely un-rock-and-roll, un-visceral, and dissapointingly uninteresting.
This video clip has been getting a lot of play in the liberal blogosphere (e.g., TPM):
In it, Mark Halperin says (with respect to the “how many houses” “controversy”):
My hunch is that this is going to end up being one of the worst moments of the entire campaign for … Barack Obama. I believe that this has opened the door up to not just Tony Rezko, in that ad, but to bringing up Reverend Wright, to bringing up his relationship with Bill Ayers…. It would have been hard for John McCain—given the way he says he’s going to run this campaign—to do all this stuff without the door being opened.
What’s interesting to me is that pretty much the entire panel jumps on him to say: that’s stupid, that’s illogical, that completely contradicts both objective reality and common sense. And he sticks to his guns, unfazed, and keeps making the argument for 2 minutes, 43 seconds.
It’s possible that Halperin is just exactly that blinkered and stupid. But it strikes me as the kind of argument I’d pitch over a beer and, after my drinking companions tore it apart, I’d shrug and say, “Yeah, that’s dumb. Forget it. I was just talking shit.” Maybe Halperin would say that over a beer, but he’s on TV. And on TV you never repudiate a stupid argument.
Comments Off on Being on television means never having to say you’re wrong
The most annoying thing in the world: when you’re saying something and your significant other is reading or watching TV or playing Scramble and not paying any attention to you.
The second most annoying thing in the world: when you are reading or watching TV or playing Scramble and your significant other won’t shut up.
Can you name a category of people (besides Republicans) who are often said to “take pride in being ignorant”? Here’s a hint. Here’s another. What is Barack Obama saying about John McCain?
Nota bene: Just kidding.
Comments Off on Did Barack Obama Play the Race Card… Again?
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but… wandering around Barcelona, I noticed these rows of red bikes in self-locking racks. It turns out this is an enterprise called Bicing, basically Zipcar-for-bikes. You pay about $45 a year to be a member and you get a card. When you need a bike, you walk down to one of these racks, sprinkled liberally through the city, wave your card and grab a bike. You pay about 50 cents a half hour to have the bike for up to two hours. When you get where you’re going, you find another a rack, lock the bike up, and leave it.
This is really cool! Similar services are popular in Lyon, Paris, and Stockholm. Why not New York? Why notyour home town here? Write your local municipal representatives and demand 1/10,000th of a bike!
A place to document tips and tricks for the various Linux, LaTeX, OCaml, and other general computer-related topics that I encounter in my daily life and a repository for supposedly amusing observations, hyperlinks, recipes, reviews, travelogues, and political opinions written when I have a spare moment (or when I don't have a spare moment, but I don't feel like working)
Procrastiblog 