Subscribe via RSS Feed

Author Page for Paul Campos

rss feed

Next on Springer: The West Wing

[ 31 ] September 3, 2008 | Paul Campos

I really don’t want to watch Sarah Palin’s speech tonight for all kinds of reasons, including but not limited to the skeeve-inducing thought of what Victor Davis Hanson will be doing at the same time, but who am I kidding, it’s like back in college when you said you weren’t going to watch a double bill of Faces of Death II and Cherry 2000 after your roommates rented them in the face of your ineffectual protests.

Maybe I’ll get through it by taking a drink any time I hear any of the following phrases:

(1) Ivy League

(2) Glass ceiling

(3) Ice road truckers

(4) Beautiful baby

(5) Working moms

Double standards

[ 0 ] September 3, 2008 | Paul Campos

My Sarah Palin theory is here. I don’t like to harp on the “imagine if Obama or Hillary” meme, but this situation really cries out for comparisons.

Imagine if Hillary had done what Palin did when Palin had her most recent child. This would needless to say have been taken as incontrivertable proof that she was a career-obsessed feminist bitch, who was legally unfit to be a mother and should have her child taken away from her before she actually killed the poor kid out of sheer callous indifference if not actual malice.

Imagine if Obama’s 17-year-old daughter were pregnant. What do you think that would “prove?”

There’s a pain where there once was a heart

[ 55 ] September 2, 2008 | Paul Campos

I wonder if anyone actually consulted with Levi “Fuckin’ Redneck” Johnston about whether he’s cool with suddenly being drafted to make an honest woman out of Bristol Palin? It sounds as if all this wedding talk may be taking him by surprise.

The Vegan Threat

[ 22 ] September 1, 2008 | Paul Campos

Glenn Greenwald is doing yeoman’s work regarding the use of state terror to quash the possibility of dissent at the RNC. Now admittedly to this point it’s what might be called “soft terror:” no one is actually being shot, for instance. Instead, people are having their doors smashed down by SWAT teams armed with ludicrous search warrants, who then proceed neutralize the Vegan Threat to Democracy by holding teenagers at gunpoint while their residences are ransacked. Hardly anyone is being charged with anything, since there appears to be no evidence that anyone was planning to break the law.

Meanwhile, despite the immediate proximity of hundreds if not thousands of journalists, all this remains invisible in the national media. A Nexis search reveals not one reference to these raids in any newspaper other than the two Twin Cities dailies. Nor has any television network mentioned them, other than a very brief reference yesterday on CNN.

Palinland

[ 0 ] August 31, 2008 | Paul Campos

I’m currently reading Nixonland, Rick Perlstein’s brilliant cultural history of the United States through the lens of the rise and fall and rise again of Richard Nixon (I don’t know yet if he gets to the final fall). Perlstein documents how Nixon invented and refined a particularly effective politics of resentment — a kind of right-wing populism that harnessed suspicion of and anger towards “eggheads,” “elitists,” and of course the nattering nabobs of negativity.

In thinking about McCain’s preposterous VP selection, it strikes me that Sarah Palin is in one sense a perfect reflection of that politics. Palin is the kind of choice that appeals to people who are contemptuous of the very idea of expertise, political or otherwise.

Unfortunately this isn’t merely a symbolic issue. McCain has, from an actuarial point of view, about a 15% chance of dying of natural causes between 2009 and 2012. In addition to the strictly medical risk that he’ll die in office, a man of his age and health history (the kind of damage he endured as a POW often has severe long-term health consequences that manifest themselves decades later) has a significantly non-trivial chance of suffering some sort of incapacitating medical event over the next few years.

The notion that there’s perhaps a one in four or five chance that, if McCain is elected, Palin, who apparently knows almost literally nothing about foreign policy, will end up in command of the world’s most powerful military ought to give anyone who doesn’t buy into charmingly idiotic Hollywood fantasies about how neat it would be if Everyman (or woman) became president through a wacky series of coincidences considerable pause.

A couple of other notes on Palin.

(1) Apparently she’s been outside the United States twice: She visited Ireland, and she took a trip to Germany and Kuwait in 2007 to visit members of the Alaska National Guard. Note that this isn’t two foreign trips while governor: it’s two international trips in her entire life. If nothing else, Canada should be outraged.

(2) She was a beauty pageant contestant while in college, and finished second in the Miss Alaska pageant. This is exactly the kind of detail that endears her to Outer Wingnuttia, including professional feminist (cough) contrarian Camille Paglia, who will no doubt soon be committing crimes against the English language while addressing this topic on an internet site near you.

We Had a Dream

[ 12 ] August 28, 2008 | Paul Campos

It’s s a beautiful morning in Boulder, and later today I’m going to take a bus the 25 miles down the turnpike to Denver and Invesco Field, to hear Barack Obama accept his party’s nomination for president, on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech.

First I’m going to teach a Legislation class that will be focused on the story of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was enacted in the face of the longest filibuster in American history, and which certainly would never have become law if not for the march on Washington, and King’s speech, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson’s brilliant exploitation of those events, and of course many other things as well.

Any sustained engagement with politics makes almost anyone quite cynical, at least at times, and I’m well aware that Barack Obama is far from a dream candidate for those of a progressive political persuasion, let alone some sort of national savior.

But at this moment I’m feeling neither cynical, nor in the mood to hedge the moment with endless academic caveats about the messy complexity of the world.

It’s a great day for America.

Please proceed to the exits in an orderly fashion

[ 10 ] August 27, 2008 | Paul Campos

2 PM Monday is when the GOP convention is scheduled to be kicking off, so this might possibly be taken as evidence that Mother Nature has a mordant sense of humor.

Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself

[ 32 ] August 27, 2008 | Paul Campos

. . . when you’re old enough to repay, but young enough to sell?
I gather Alex Rodriguez was booed mercilessly last night for single-handedly destroying the Yanqui season. NYY seems headed towards a dodgy transitional year or three (ARod will be 34 next summer and he’s still almost the youngest guy on the team who can play), and I have a feeling that the $300 million man is going to be the target for the frustrations of many an overpriced ticket buyer in the team’s palatial new digs.
I wonder if he’s having second thoughts . . .

Science, Religion, and the First Amendment

[ 258 ] August 25, 2008 | Paul Campos

Following up on Rob’s post, if a public high school biology teacher teaches his or her students that there is no evidence for the existence of God (or, in what amounts to the same thing, that science provides no evidence for the existence of God and the only valid evidence on that question is what counts as evidence within the confines of science), then that teacher isn’t merely teaching science, but rather espousing scientism, which for the purposes of First Amendment establishment clause doctrine is a quasi-religious view. For a teacher to espouse a religious or quasi-religious view in a public school classroom is a violation of the establishment clause according to current constitutional doctrine.

Parenthetical edited for clarity.

Ummmm . . .

[ 33 ] August 25, 2008 | Paul Campos

. . . what was that?

Joe Biden, Drug Warrior

[ 35 ] August 24, 2008 | Paul Campos

Radley Balko points out that Biden’s voting record on drug issues in particular and civil liberties in general is quite bad. (Edit: As a couple of commentators have noted, Biden’s overall civil liberties record isn’t as bad as Balko is making it out to be).

FWIW I think on average too much attention gets paid to VP picks (this rule contains an exception for nominating one of Satan’s actual minions). Still there are a lot of things about the Biden pick that are troublesome. Yglesias notes that Biden’s Iraq vote seems to have been based on the rather strange theory that an Iraq war skeptic could influence the process in a positive way by supporting the Bush administration’s push for maximum latitude in going to war.

Further thoughts: What really bugs me about the Biden pick is that he voted for the war, and picking him inevitably blurs the message of what a gigantic mistake that was. It also reinforces the myth that it was “political suicide” to vote against the war in 2002. In fact more than half of the Democratic members of Congress voted against the war, including a solid minority of senators, and of course far from being political suicide, there’s no real doubt Clinton would be the nominee if she had simply done the right thing at the time. As Scott pointed out yesterday, the Beltway wisdom on Iraq remains so twisted that having voted for the war makes Biden more acceptable in the eyes of the Villagers.

McCain’s Housing Crisis

[ 48 ] August 21, 2008 | Paul Campos

I haven’t developed any strong feelings about Obama’s VP choice, but I sort of like this guy’s style.

It would have been better if he had pointed out McCain’s idea of a housing crisis is not being able to remember how many houses your Sugar Mama has bought for you.

Update: “At least four” apparently means “at least ten.” But who’s counting? (Info courtesy AmericansUnitedForChange.org)

“Of those 80 million homeowners, only 55 million have a mortgage at all, and 51 million are doing what is necessary –working a second job, skipping a vacation, and managing their budgets — to make their payments on time. That leaves us with a puzzling situation: how could 4 million mortgages cause this much trouble for us all?
–John McCain [Economic Speech in Santa Ana, CA, 3/25/08]

Ten Homes = $13,823,269

John & Cindy McCain Own At Least Ten Houses In Arizona, California, and Virginia Worth an Estimated $13,823,269. John and Cindy McCain own a plethora of houses spread throughout the United States, including: two beachfront condos in Coronado, California, condo in La Jolla, California, a two-unit condominium complex in Phoenix, Arizona, three ranch houses located outside of Sedona, Arizona, a high-rise condo in Arlington, Virginia, a rental loft, and, according to GQ, a loft they bought for their daughter, Meghan. The value of their houses is an estimated $13,823,269. [San Diego County Property Records; Maricopa County Property Records; Yavapai County Property Records; Arlington County Property Records; GQ, 3/18/08; McCain 2008 Senate Financial Disclosure Report]

1. 1n 2006, McCains Purchased Two Condominiums in Phoenix For $4,666,814. According to property records from Maricopa County, Arizona, the McCains spent $4,666,814 Condominium in Phoenix, AZ in 2006. Officially, the sale was made to The Cindy Hensley McCain Family Trust on October 18, 2006. (2211 E Camelback Rd., Units 1105& 1106, 85016) [Maricopa County Property Records]

2. The McCains Own A $2,705,040 Beachfront Condominium on a Small Island Outside of San Diego. According to property records from San Diego County, California the McCains own a $2,705,040 condominium in Coronado, California. Coronado boasts the second best beach in the country, according to the Travel Channel. The condominium is officially the property of Dream Catcher Family. (1710 Avenida Del Mundo, Unit #802, 92118) [San Diego County Property Records; City of Coronado website, accessed 3/31/08, emphasis added]

3. In February 2008, The McCains Bought Another $2.1 Million Condominium In Coronado. According to property records from San Diego County, California the McCains bought another $2.1 million condominium in Coronado, California. Records show that the sale was completed on February 27, 2008. The condominium is officially the property of Dream Catcher Family. (1710 Avenida Del Mundo, Unit #204, 92118) [San Diego County Property Records]

The McCains Own Three “Hidden Valley Ranches” Worth $1,103,615 in 2007. According to property records from Yavapai County, Arizona, the McCains own three ranch houses worth a combined $1,103,615:

4. $405,757 – 11455 E Hidden Valley Ranch Rd
5. $369,929 – 11445 E Hidden Valley Ranch Rd
6. $327,929 –11415 E Hidden Valley Ranch Rd

The first two ranch properties are held by the Cindy Hensley McCain Family Trust, while the third is held by Sedona Hidden Valley Limited Partnership. According to the Arizona Republic, the three houses include, “A main house, guest house and caretakers’ quarters [and] total more than 4,800 square feet.” [Yavapai County Property Records; 2007 Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure; Arizona Republic, 8/12/00]

· McCain Has Said There Are Six Houses On His Lot. According to CNN, “McCain said the valley was settled by Mormons and that the Hidden Valley Ranch got its name from the horseshoe shape of the creek that runs through the property. He said he built the first house on his property 24 years ago and now there are six houses on his lot.” [CNN, 3/3/08, emphasis added]

7. McCains Own A $1 Million Condominium In La Jolla, California. According to John McCain’s Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure, the McCains own a condominium in La Jolla, California valued at over $1 million. The La Jolla property is held in the Hensley Survivors Trust. (8263 Camino Del Oro #379, 92037) [2007 Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure ; San Diego County Property Records]

8. The McCains Own A $847,800 High-Rise Condominium in Arlington, Virginia. According to property records from Arlington County, Virginia, the McCains own a $847,800 High-Rise Condominium in Arlington, Virginia. The condominium is officially the property of the Cindy Hensley McCain Family Trust. (1300 Crystal Drive #1702S, 22202) [Arlington County Property Records]

9. McCains Bought Their Daughter A $700,000 Loft When She Graduated From College. According to property records from Maricopa County Arizona, the McCains purchased a $700,000 Phoenix Loft in May of 2007. Wild River LLC bought the loft on May 24, 2007. (4326 N 25th St., Unit 2, Phoenix, AZ 85016) [Maricopa County Property Records]

10. The McCains Own A Rental Loft In Phoenix, Arizona. According to property records from Maricopa County Arizona, the McCains purchased a high-class $700,000 Phoenix Loft in June of 2007. The loft is owned by Wild River LLC, and is listed as rental property on McCain’s 2008 Senate Financial Disclosure Report. (4326 N 25th St, Unit 102, Phoenix, AZ, 85016) [Maricopa County Property Records, McCain 2008 Senate Financial Disclosure Report]

Page 61 of 64« First...1020305960616263...Last »

    • Switch to our mobile site