Tomorrow is my birthday, and we’ll be driving up to Seal Beach to dine at Beachwood BBQ, in large part due to this review (and this beer menu). We would normally do something fancier, but so many of our attempts to have a nice meal in Orange County have met with disappointment due to relatively average food being sold at exceptional prices. I’m stoked, because I don’t believe another Family Pie Shop patron would lead me astray.

This is clearly the right thing to do, ethically. But I’m interested in whether others think it’s politically motivated. To me, it seems like a net loss politically. Sure, on the one hand you gain because you seem less like a despicable hate monger. But on the other, you had a lot of crazy people really fired up, and it seems like they’re going to feel jerked around. One day you want us to think he’s a terrorist, and on the other he’s just a good guy with whom you have some disagreements. “WTF, John?,” ask the crazies, who in their confusion just stay home on election night. So I think it’s doubly impressive, because I was beginning to think that McCain was incapable of thinking of any good beyond his own election to the presidency.

Anyone else see this differently?

Am I off base, or was this one of the most soporific presidential debates in a while? Frankly, I didn’t think either one of them did very well. There was way too much rambling, and way too few sharp points. Overall, McCain was more lively than Obama, but if the point of the debate was for Obama to show that he could hold his own on national security, then count it a win for Obama. I wouldn’t call him a big winner, but he certainly did at least as well as McCain, and that might have been all he needed.

Overall, I agree: the debate lagged at many points with digressions that most voters probably will have little interest in. Immediately after watching I would have checked this as a small win for McCain (basically for the liveliness that Drum mentions), but I can also see the Obama foreign policy victory side. If you were really watching because you thought this guy knew nothing about the situation in various foreign countries, he came across as someone who knew the issues but disagreed with McCain on various points. And maybe that is all that matters.

I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago, that’s an important - I want to know that, I really do, because she’s going to have the nuclear codes.

“That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

(more…)

Of all the material I’ve read, the most thoroughly critical is this open letter by Anne Kilkenny, Wasilla City Council member and old political opponent of Palin. Obviously, you have to read her words keeping in mind that she was pitted against Palin in various battles after the latter became Mayor. But many of them are facts that undermine the “reformer with executive experience” line. For example. she built up her own “responsibilities” in her job as Mayor in her acceptance speech, but failed to mention that immediately upon taking office she appointed a an administrator to help her run things. Mind you, this is how she described the job upon taking office: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” I gather that the administrator mentioned in the Kilkenny letter is the one mentioned in this ADN article (which provides some more useful background reading):

She quickly hired a deputy administrator, reworking the city budget to find money for the $50,000-a-year position, which had been empty for several years. Critics said it showed she wasn’t up to the job, but Palin defended it as necessary for the fast-growing city.

Critics also noted that the deputy, John Cramer, had been hired from the staff of Sen. Lyda Green, one of the local Republicans who had endorsed Palin in the race. They said it smacked of party patronage.

So the executive experience praised in her speech turned out to require someone else to do part of her job for her. And she “reformed” the office by selecting that person from the staff of another prominent state Republican. To be fair, Palin’s managed to make an enemy of Lyda Green, as evidenced by a quote made in this article, so if turning on the people who helped you get where you are is what makes you a reformer, then I guess Palin does have some claim to that title.

Every responsible voter should read the whole Kilkenny letter, but also follow up on the stronger claims. For example, Kilkenny mentions the clash over Palin’s intention to fire the city librarian, which the ADN covered in more depth here (albeit retrospectively - that article was written last week).

Oh, and for fun, read this account (nearly impossible to confirm) that Palin called Obama “Sambo”. I wouldn’t put too much stock in this since it’s the only source is a waitress who refused to reveal her identity, but it’s plausible for a woman who compared herself to a pitbull.

Meanwhile, you should check out this description of how the people at TDS put together these clips, which Adam linked to a few days ago. And while I’m here, I should say that I’m glad the people at TDS built their website so that sharing these types of clips is so easy. Way to embrace technology and free advertising, guys.

“Let me be a clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.

“And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and, you know, teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits.”

You might disagree with that, but you have to admit that it’s classy. With that in mind, let’s have John McCain with a comment at a GOP fund-raiser in 1999:

Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.

Last week The Daily Show ran a bit where John Oliver went up to people dancing at the DNC and asked them serious questions like “What is [Barack Obama] going to do to resolve the mortgage crisis?” When the revelers gave answers like, “He’s going to do everything right,” Oliver said, “I’m just worried those are soundbites with no substance.” I know it’s The Daily Show’s job to be achingly cynical, but I’m still surprised to see them missing the point so badly. While I have no idea what Barack Obama would do to resolve the crisis in South Ossetia, I just don’t think that matters. Among so many more things, I am tired of having a raging dick for a president. I want to be able to watch the news without seething, and only one candidate seems likely to give me that.