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Happy birthday John Lennon

[ 32 ] October 9, 2008 | Paul Campos

Who is 68 today in minus space time or plus soul time.

Random thoughts:

(1) Lennon’s murder may have had more emotional impact on me than any other public event (I was 21 at the time Lennon was killed so I’m just barely old enough to remember the assassinations of King and RFK, but for an eight-year-old those were abstract events in faraway places. Lennon’s death took place at home as it were).

(2) Lennon was both a strikingly unique person and one of the characteristic figures of his time.

(3) I wonder if the financial pressure for a Beatles reunion would have built up to the point where it would have been irresistable? Leaving aside personally materialistic considerations, if somebody offers you a billion dollars or whatever I suppose you’re almost ethically obliged to take it from them, so you can do some good things with it.

(4) Five favorite Lennon songs at this moment:

Don’t Let Me Down
Rain
Yer Blues
Dear Prudence
#9 Dream

Ayers and Kissinger

[ 0 ] October 8, 2008 | Paul Campos

I only allude to the point in this column, but what makes people like Ayers and Kissinger similar is that, if your socio-economic status is high enough, it’s very difficult not to remain “respectable” in the eyes of at least a good piece of the Establishment, no matter what you’ve done.

The Freepers have pretty much run up the white flag

[ 0 ] October 8, 2008 | Paul Campos

And I do mean white.

In case you’re not interested in doing a header into a cyber-sewer, here are some highlights:

“I have 14 grandchildren . I do not want them growing up for the next four years, in a society ran by a banana republic would be president. And a wife who has an attitude and a true dislike for the white race.Folks this is getting down right ridiculous!”

“I dread seeing that horsey militant Michelle Obama descreting the White House.”

Another commentator puzzles over what the possibility of one side winning a coin toss three times in a row is, and wonders if such an extraordinarily unlikely occurance might signal yet more media bias.

But the dominant attitude seems to be that God has decided to punish America by making Obama president.

If we let the other team score, then The Terrorists will have won

[ 22 ] October 7, 2008 | Paul Campos

That’s apparently as good an explanation as any for the strange behavior of NFL coaches at the end of games. For instance, tonight Minnesota gets to the New Orleans 14-yard-line in a tie game with 1:10 to go. The Saints have two time outs left, which means that if the Vikings run the ball three times Ryan Longwell will attempt a chip shot field goal with about fifteen seconds left. Longwell has made his last 43 attempts from under 45 yards. Plus this game is inside, so weather is no factor. So unless Minnesota fumbles or commits a dumb penalty New Orleans is looking at close to a 100% probability of fielding a kickoff down by three points with about ten seconds to go — a situation in which the trailing team’s chances of winning are nearly zero.

On the other hand, if they let Minnesota score on the first play of the series, they get the ball back with a minute to go and two time outs down by seven. Not a good situation, of course, but not nearly as bad as what they’ll get if they play it straight up.

And it’s not as if this is an unusual thing — similar situations come up almost every week in the NFL. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen an NFL coach decide to just let the other team score.

A more general problem here is that NFL kickers have gotten too good. As Longwell’s streak illustrates, it’s now to the point where anything under 45 yards is almost an extra point for a lot of these guys. Nate Kaeding has made 49 of 50 career attempts at home from under *50* yards. It’s much, much easier for an offense to get inside the 30 than it is to score a TD, yet getting inside the 30 is now practically equivalent to half a touchdown.

Speaking of internet traditions, I understand this blog has a venerable one of flagging absurd claims by Mickey Kaus

[ 33 ] October 3, 2008 | Paul Campos

In that spirit, Kaus on the VP debate:

Big loser, again, is Hillary. In two years Palin will be so much better she won’t even be in the same league. …

The only plausible explanation I can think of for this “analysis” is that he’s thinking with the wrong head. That’s obviously the case with Rich Lowry:

Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.

As an openly heterosexual male, this sort of thing makes me want to apologize on behalf of my entire gender and orientation. I suspect that that the idea of being consciously sexually attracted to an authority figure is such a mind-blowing experience for these fellows that they just can’t handle it. It was bad enough when they were drooling over Commander Codpiece.

If there’s a group of Americans who really understand what the average voter is thinking

[ 0 ] October 3, 2008 | Paul Campos

It’s surely highly-paid TV pundits who are completely obsessed with bizarrely involuted meta-critiques of politics as infotainment theater.

Yglesias is spot on regarding this, but I think what he’s saying can be extended to the blogosphere as well. We forget that most Americans, and in particular most Americans whose presidential votes aren’t already cast in concrete, don’t follow this stuff with anything like the obsessiveness of political junkies. They don’t “grade on a curve,” they don’t care about the expectations game, and a lot of them hadn’t spent five minutes thinking about Sarah Palin or for that matter Joe Biden before last night.

So when they saw Biden and Palin together, they didn’t engage in some hyper-complicated meta-analysis of the symbolic meaning of blah blah blah in the context of yadda yadda yadda. They thought, by solid margins if the post-debate polls are accurate, what you would expect previously unengaged people of normal intelligence without strong ideological biases to think: that Biden was on the whole more impressive.

Things

[ 43 ] October 2, 2008 | Paul Campos

(1) As a new blogger I’m clearly not aware of all internet traditions, as I didn’t realize that deleting a post I had put up a couple of minutes earlier after I realized that I was linking to a satire is considered a breach of blogger etiquette. Is there more or less a consensus on this point?

(2) As a fanatic Michigan Wolverine football fan I think I can picture the exact interpretive lens through which McCain supporters are going to be watching the debate tonight. For complicated reasons Michigan’s starting quarterback in the team’s first game this season was a true walk-on (an ordinary college student without an athletic scholarship). He seems like a hard-working kid and I don’t mean to pick on him, but it turned out that he simply didn’t have anything like the talent necessary for the job he was thrust into. But for an entire game we fans talked ourselves into believing that he wasn’t doing that badly. “See, that five-yard swing pass was really accurate!” “See, that go route wasn’t really that overthrown!” “See, he had a pretty solid game if you just don’t count those five horrible passes!” But by the next day everybody sobered up and realized we had to find somebody who could play quarterback.

(3) I’m doing this roundtable Saturday afternoon in NYC. It could be interesting. (The chances of Sarah Palin’s name not coming up can be calculated as approximately zero).

OK, this isn’t satire

[ 16 ] October 2, 2008 | Paul Campos

I think:

Palin also claimed she was eager for the debate since the media had been ‘censoring’ her: “Getting to speak directly to Americans without that filter of mainstream media trying to I think maybe censor some of my comments as we lay out those contrasts between these two different tickets.”

Apparently she gave a bunch of brilliant and incisive responses to questions posed to her by biased Katie Couric and mean ‘ol Charlie Gibson, and the mainstream media edited all that stuff right out of the broadcasts.

Those bastards!

Please make it stop

[ 28 ] October 2, 2008 | Paul Campos

COURIC: Do you think there’s an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution?

PALIN: I do. Yeah, I do.

COURIC: That’s the cornerstone of Roe v Wade

PALIN: I do. And I believe that –individual states can handle what the people within the different constituencies in the 50 states would like to see their will ushered in in an issue like that.

COURIC: What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with?

PALIN: Well, let’s see. There’s –of course –in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings, that’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are–those issues, again, like Roe v Wade where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know–going through the history of America, there would be others but–

COURIC: Can you think of any?

PALIN: Well, I could think of–of any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a Vice President, if I’m so privileged to serve, wouldn’t be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today.

Her answers here are a complete mess.

(1) She believes there’s a constitutional right to privacy, but she disagrees with the holding in Roe, which is the leading case for that proposition. Well what’s encompassed by this right then? What about, for example, Griswold? (Unconstitutional to criminalize the purchase of contraception by married couples). I realize Couric isn’t a lawyer, but that followup would have occured to a lot of journalists.

(2) If the basis for opposing Roe is because you believe, as she says she does, that abortion involves the killing of an innocent human life, then its nonsensical to turn into a states’ rights issue as she does. That’s equivalent to saying you think slavery is a gross violation of human rights, but whether its legal ought to be left up to individual states. In effect she’s saying “I think whether murder ought to be legal or not should be decided at the local level.”

(3) She can’t name one other SCOTUS decision she disagrees with? This isn’t a law school classroom — it’s not like she even has to give a case name. How about Kelo, the recent takings case that had all Wingnuttia in an uproar? She could have simply described what happened — elderly lady kicked out of lifelong home for the sake of a private development project. How about affirmative action? The death penalty? Lawrence v. Texas? (State can’t criminalize homosexual activities between consenting adults — another privacy case by the way).

This is probably a classic example of dog whistle politics — even she seems to realize that on culture war issues the orthodoxies demanded by the GOP base have become quite unpopular, so she dodges the questions by feigning total ignorance. On the other hand, at this point Occam’s razor suggests she may actually be this ignorant.

(4) The last bit about having no role in changing the law seems to be based on an implicit promise that she’ll never actually be president.

Update: Reading through the responses in the cold light of day I realize I’ve way overanalyzed this: as Aimai reminds me, she really doesn’t know anything about anything. OK she knows two things: she’s opposed to legal abortion (this is part of the hard drive and requires no software installation), and the federal government should leave a lot of controversial issues to the states (this is probably the one talking point that stuck when she was being drilled over the last month on what to say regarding these matters).

And dogwhistle and Hogan make a key point: if she can’t even repeat the half dozen basic buzzwords on an issue like the role of the courts in American life, how reliable will she be on anything? They’ve really outsmarted themselves with this one.

Turning trick questions

[ 0 ] October 1, 2008 | Paul Campos

Although I haven’t seen it I understand there’s a David Cronenberg movie in which people are subjected to telekinetic bombardment until their heads actually explode. If the increasingly unstable state of my cranium is any indication, the McCain campaign seems to be deploying Sarah Palin for a similar purpose. From her cozy little chat with Hugh Hewitt yesterday:

HH: Now Governor, the Gibson and the Couric interview struck many as sort of pop quizzes designed to embarrass you as opposed to interviews. Do you share that opinion?

SP: Well, I have a degree in journalism also, so it surprises me that so much has changed since I received my education in journalistic ethics all those years ago. But I’m not going to pick a fight with those who buy ink by the barrelful. I’m going to take those shots and those pop quizzes and just say that’s okay, those are good testing grounds. And they can continue on in that mode. That’s good.

Palin’s response has gotten surprisingly little attention. After all, she’s accusing Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric of breaching journalistic ethics, by asking her pop quiz-style trick questions, intentionally designed to embarrass her. This, needless to say, is a serious accusation.

Of course if her response had been to a question from a real journalist instead of an intellectual crack whore, the follow-up would have been, “What specific questions were you asked that in your view were unethical?”

But not everybody is Hugh Hewitt. Somebody ought to ask her now. Does being asked what she thinks of Congress trying to bail out Wall Street count as a pop quiz? How about Couric’s relentless queries regarding her newspaper-reading habits? At this point, what would count as “fair” question to ask Palin? How much she loves her kids?

Also, this column was posted at a couple of the bigger right-wing sites, so I’ve gotten a couple of hundred emails. Although most are devoted to informing me that I am an elitist, an encouraging number are from Republicans or right-leaning independents who say they were going to vote for McCain before he picked Palin, but now won’t.

Random sports stuff

[ 39 ] September 30, 2008 | Paul Campos

(1) A statistic that will appeal to any baseball fan’s inner geek: Alex Rodriguez has scored one fewer run than he’s batted in in his career, and he’s consequently 691 RBI short of Hank Aaron’s career record, and 690 runs scored short of Rickey Henderson’s career mark. Bill James’s favorite toy formula gives him a 39% chance of breaking the RBI record and a 36% shot at the runs scored crown. It also projects him to finish with exactly 760 career home runs (somehow I doubt he’ll stop at just that number), which of course means he’s projected at even money to break Bonds’ record.

(2) As a Detroit Lions fan, it gives me a certain grim comfort to know that Oakland Raiders fans are in an even worse position, given that their franchise is being held hostage by a senile madman. Al Davis’ latest stunt is that he’s flatly refusing to pay the millions he owes newly fired coach Lane Kiffin. Davis has a history of doing this (he still owes Mike Shanahan a lot of money). Davis, who is 79, claims that he won’t quit until “he” wins two more Super Bowls.

(3) The NFL replay rule, which gives coaches three challenges per game, plus unlimited replay discretion for the officals in the last two minutes of halves, is vastly superior to the college version, where every play is subject to potential review at the discretion of the officials. This leads to pointless delays as the refs review trivial plays, compounded by their occasional failure to review crucial plays that absolutely should be looked at again. A flaw with both systems is the standard of review, which is far too high — “indisputable visual evidence,” which is supposed to be a beyond a reasonable doubt standard. If you’re going to review the play, it should be done on a de novo basis, or maybe with a clear and convincing standard, which in effect is what a lot of replay officals end up using informally.

(4) This is pretty awesome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyLCo5AUo0A

Don’t know much about history

[ 47 ] September 29, 2008 | Paul Campos

The latest edition of the Palin Follies is a report that a so-far unaired portion of the Couric interview reveals that she is apparently unable to name any Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade.

Obviously being next in line for the presidency doesn’t require that one be a Jeopardy trivia champ, but on the other hand people need to keep in mind that we humans don’t come with pre-loaded software or anything.

If you’ve spent you’re whole life in a small town in a sparsely populated and very isolated part of the world, with the exception of the six years you spent messing around at five colleges, (by the way the media have remained studiously uninterested in the details of her curious academic wanderings — was she, for instance, getting kicked out of schools for poor performance?), and you can’t answer the most straightfoward interview questions without conjuring up phrases like “train wreck” and “verbal salad” even among some of your political allies, then there’s no particular reason why anyone should assume you know much of anything at all pertaining to the wide world beyond the borders of Wasilla Alaska.

I suspect the depth of Palin’s ignorance can be compared to a well in which you toss a rock, and then wait for it to hit the bottom, and then you wait, and you wait . . . and you start to wonder if the thing goes all the way to China, and finally many seconds later there’s an incredibly distant, barely audible plunk.

Does she know what the Bill of Rights is, or the Louisiana Purchase? Can she identify where the phrase “four score and seven years ago” comes from? Does she remember the Maine? The League of Nations? The New Deal? Seriously, I’d like to hear her describe what the Vietnam war was about, or for that matter Watergate or the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

And somebody who doesn’t know anything about history isn’t going to know — indeed in a crucial sense can’t know — anything about current events, which after all can only be understood properly within a sufficiently rich historical context.

Oh it’s all morbidly fascinating, until somebody gets hurt.

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