Tell Me Your Favorite Presidential Campaign Books! Even if everyone just says Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and Boys on the Bus, I'd be interested in knowing what your favorites are. Doing some research here, etc.

08/12/2004 05:20 PM  |  Comment (26)

While You’re at it, Buy This Record

Them's The Mere Mortals, featuring Fought Down lead guitar-slinger Axel Steuerwald (the vampire to the right) on lead vox & songwriting. They've got a terrific EP out that's been making the heavy rotation on our alarmingly high-quality Indie 103.1 radio station, especially the Steve "Sex Pistols" Jones show. (Check out the gushy Jones quote on MM's main page.) The EP is a limited edition number with neato cover art, and can be had for the low low price of $7 (that includes shipping). Listen to some MP3s if you don't take my word for it, and watch that space for upcoming shows.

08/12/2004 04:12 PM  |  Comment (2)

This Is the Art Opening You Need to Attend:

That’s the world-famous COOP, the rock-and-roll devil-girl poster boy extraordinaire, adding some touches to his absolutely massive new painting, “Parts With Appeal,” that will be making its global debut Saturday night at the sixspace gallery in downtown Los Angeles (549 W. 23rd St., at Figueroa, plenty of parking, reception from 7 to 10). For those of you unlucky enough to live near Southern California, I heartily encourage you to browse through the merch and artworks of an American original.

08/12/2004 12:32 PM  | 

Bonjour, Frenchies! Mais, le meilleur blog c'est jusqu'i.

08/12/2004 11:49 AM  |  Comment (2)

A Reason to Love the 'Continue Reading' Function: Noam Chomsky, in addition to his other accomplishments, is one of the most dreadful prose stylists in the English language. But nothing cuts straight to the comedy of his grave absolutism than the "Continue Reading" cut-offs facilitated by the publishing software on his blog. Check out these gems:

* The basic theory is incontrovertible. The only questions have to do with timing and cost. ...

* The sharp increase in focus on Iran's alleged threat (nuclear weapons, connections to terror, etc.) is very clear. ...

* Regarding the rising price of oil, the first point to remember is that the price of oil is not high by historical standards.

* I won't run through the details regarding Somalia since you can find a lot in print, right at the time and later.

* I think there are many reasons why the South African analogy does not apply to this case.

08/12/2004 02:50 AM  |  Comment (8)

What Bush’s Economic Plan Should Look Like: An interesting list from Tyler Cowen. (Via Les Jones)

08/12/2004 02:16 AM  | 

The Usefulness of Seemingly Partisan-Motivated Obsessiveness: Regarding that kerfuffle below, Glenn Reynolds writes:

I think that this is an important issue, and I would have thought that two champions of the blogosphere like Matt and Jeff would have approved my work to bring in original documents and material not available on the web, and make them part of the conversation.

All that said, if this Cambodia Hat thing turns out to be a creepy lie, then that's pretty damning, and the court of public BSing will owe you & the other drum-bangers a debt of gratitude.

With the Spinsanity guys, the question was never "Are they ready for prime time?" but "Why doesn’t every newsroom with more than 100 employees have a built-in Spinsanity?" After all, newspaper journalists never tire of reminding cynical outsiders about their hard-earned "credibility" and well-trained bullshit-detecting skills. And since newspaper profit margins still exceed 20 percent on average, why not deploy these remarkable resources to tell readers whether their favorite authors or columnists or politicians are full of it?

Keefer theorizes that "reporters really don’t...evaluate the truthfulness of their subject." He says that’s in part because they’re taught in journalism school that to be balanced you have to represent both sides fairly. "They’re good at picking up when someone’s obviously lying, but what they’re not good at is picking up the sort of fudges that people do." John Timpane, the Inquirer editor who made the deal with Spinsanity, says newspapers "are fighting a losing battle, partly because there’s so much stuff [to fact-check] and partly because they're all understaffed....That's not a defense, because we should do a much better job than we do."

Or maybe professionally nonpartisan institutions just aren't the best generators of the political passion that fuels so much amateur media criticism. Both Keefer and Timpane are unusually committed to the elevation of reason over rhetoric. Keefer studied history at Stanford under professors who believed "it's not all subjective impressions; it's not just however you feel or whatever; there really are facts." And Timpane, a former English professor who taught at Rutgers, Stanford, and elsewhere, co-wrote Writing Worth Reading, a textbook that included a large section on "how to avoid the pitfalls of easy argumentation and how to make a strong argument without making some of the errors, like...name-calling."

08/12/2004 01:02 AM  |  Comment (12)

Any Libertarians out There Want to Take a Crack at This? From my pal Cathy Seipp:

My position against gay marriage is essentially libertarian, although I've never managed to convince my libertarian friends of this. But really, why is expanding the state into private living arrangements something that libertarians should wish to do? In any case, declining to legally recognize gay marriage may be right or it may be wrong, but it doesn't take rights away from anyone, despite rather hysterical current arguments to the contrary. You can't take away something that has never, in the history of the human race, existed in the first place.

08/11/2004 12:47 PM  |  Comment (25)

I’ve Just Slashed My Ad Rates in Half! For those with a hankering to give me money. Tragically, BlogAds undercounts my traffic pretty substantially -- I get 2,400 visitors a day, not 6,000 per week -- though I don’t have much sense of whether the ads are useful to anyone or not. Still, there are worse $75 gambles out there. (Like betting that the Redsox will even make the playoffs, for example.)

08/11/2004 12:21 PM  |  Comment (2)

'Matt Welch Is an Assclown' Blog: Yes, the lifelong burden of being a Red Sox fan -- in every sense of the phrase -- has finally caused one grown "man" to snap.

08/11/2004 12:39 AM  |  Comment (9)

New National Post Column -- "Confessions of a 'Booger': The Agony and Ecstasy of Being a Democratic Convention Weblogger": I guess it ends up a little bit short on the "ecstasy" count.

08/10/2004 01:14 PM  |  Comment (1)

Tim Blair = Stalinist: Just let the record show that Tim Blair, Australia's favorite so-called "encourag[or of] global capitalism's savage inequities," has been prattling on, shrimps-on-the-barbie style, for the previous 90 minutes about how "Californians hate the planet" because we refuse to acquiesce to his Third World diktats about "using a clothesline instead of those energy-abusing clothes dryers." (I had to insert the word "clothes" in front of "dryers" in the previous sentence because, as another party rightly pointed out, the Australian race "wouldn't understand what you are talking about.") He literally carried an armful of his terrible under-garments to my backyard this afternoon, asking "where's the clothesline?" I could have sworn he even used the phrase "sustainable development" at some point, but maybe that was just me cursing at him. At any rate, he is basically a Communist.

08/10/2004 12:22 AM  |  Comment (19)

Adventures in Community College Courses: The instructor knows the terrifying answer.

08/09/2004 05:45 PM  | 

This Cartoon Is Worth More Than 1,200 Words: I wrote a hopefully humorous piece for this weekend’s National Post about what it was like to be a blogger at the Democratic Convention (will post it as soon as I can); meanwhile, Tom Tomorrow nailed it in just six panels.

08/09/2004 02:50 PM  |  Comment (1)

Dept. of Dreadful Lead Paragraphs: From the LA CityBeat's Mick Farren:

I learned a lot in the four days of last week's Democratic National Convention. I learned I have a passion for Teresa Heinz Kerry, and that Barack Obama is so brilliantly charismatic, he may well be an alien come to save humanity. I was reminded that Bill Clinton is still the Elvis Presley of political orators, and of why I liked Wes Clark in the first place. The tale of Alexandra Kerry's pet hamster is etched in my memory, but, above all, I learned that I detest Chris Matthews, and the absurd egos of cable-news performers may be the greatest threat to democracy since the Nazi Party.

08/09/2004 02:10 PM  |  Comment (5)

Jose Mesa, Professional Relief Pitcher and Procreator: Alert reader Scott "Look how busy I am at work" Ross asks you to click on the link, note the date of birth, and then read the biographical info at the bottom of the page.

08/09/2004 01:41 PM  |  Comment (6)

Is There a 'Pretty Much' Legal Standard? Glenn Reynolds, writing about the Swift Boat Dudes Who Hate John Kerry:

Indeed, if people start dishing dirt about these guys instead of offering factual refutations, it will pretty much serve as an admission that the charges are true.

What I don't understand is how anyone professes to truly give a flip about what John Kerry and George Bush did 32 or 36 years ago. On Friday, I was given a talking-to by a right-of-center friend (who told me, helpfully, that "even though you're a liberal we still like you") about Why I Should Care About the Swift Boaters, and last night a left-of-the-dial pal wanted to get me excited about Bush's National Guard service … and in both cases my reaction is the same: Is this what you're basing your vote on this November? Really? Whatever happened to the New Seriousness after Sept. 11? And how many people who are feverishly talking up all this nonsense have NOT already long made up their minds on who they're going to vote for?

As far as I can tell, every presidential candidate with military experience has embellished it, and every candidate with a youthful drug habit has tried to paper it over. If either one of these guys has used a dime of taxpayer money to obfuscate their pasts, well that sure is worthy of rebuke, but it would still rank about 1,754th on my list of Decisive Issues come November. Actually, that's not even true, it wouldn't rank at all. I'm going to vote for the guy who I think will do the best job leading the most powerful country in the world in the war against people who want to blow us up, period. Everything else -- only 32,000 new jobs this month! This one dude acted weird at a Wendy's! -- is an increasingly pointless and unfunny diversion. UPDATE: Reynolds says I’m off-base (see also comment# 47); Jeff Jarvis says I said it well; Thomas Nephew says he can’t quite agree with me & Jeff, and JunkYardBlog says Ronald Reagan, for one, didn’t embellish his military record.

08/09/2004 11:51 AM  |  Comment (69)

Hi! What are you doing down here?