August 8, 2008
THE SHORTER THE BETTER:
Republican Doesn't Plan Long Speech (Michael D. Shear, August 9, 2008, Washington Post)
Mark Salter, the top aide and longtime speechwriter for John McCain, has written a "working draft" of the senator's address to the Republican National Convention and is circulating the draft to a very limited number of his aides, sources inside the campaign said.The speech as written runs roughly 21 minutes, but it could end up being even shorter, because McCain is not a fan of lengthy speeches, aides to the candidate said.
Other than the guys giving them, who is?
WHEN CLOUDS GATHER OVER THE U.S. ECONOMY....:
Dollar surges as markets put their money on US (Gary Duncan, 8/08/08, Times of London)
The dollar charged higher yesterday, extending its biggest 24-hour rally against the euro since 1999, as currency markets scrambled to rethink competing economic prospects in the United States and the eurozone.Dramatic gains by the dollar that took it to its highest for five months against a broad range of currencies sparked predictions from economists that it is embarked on a long-term recovery, after a five-year run of unrelenting weakness.
The rally in the dollar in yesterday’s frenetic trading triggered the steepest one-day losses for the euro for four years, sent US blue-chip shares soaring and fuelled sharp falls in oil prices of more than $3 a barrel.
...you know the storm will make landfall abroad.
BENNY CARTER WOULD HAVE BEEN 101 TODAY:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiBqSOQFOZY
IT'S ONE THING TO BE STUMPED BY ROGER MUDD... (via Bryan Francoeur):
ANYONE UP FOR A ROUSING GAME OF FLYING BUNGHOLE?
One Nation, Under a New Obama Salute (Paul Bedard, 8/07/08, US News)
George Bush had his three-fingered W salute that supporters flashed when greeting him at presidential campaign events in 2000. And now, if a Los Angeles creative agency gets its way, Sen. Barack Obama will see fans meet him with his own salute like the one above. "Our goal is to see a crowd of 75,000 people at Obama's nomination speech holding their hands above their heads, fingers laced together in support of a new direction for this country, a renewed hope, and acceptance of responsibility for our future," says Rick Husong, owner of The Loyalty Inc. Husong tells me that he got the idea after seeing the famous Obama-Progress poster by artist Shepherd Fairey.
Cult? What cult?
AS LONG AS WE GET TO GO BACK TO BURNING WITCHES:
God's Welfare State (Mark D. Tooley, 8/07/08, FrontPageMagazine.com)
The Islamic Society of North America recently has joined the National Council of Churches, Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, two Jewish groups, the National Association of Evangelicals and Catholic Charities to urge Obama and McCain to give primetime convention speeches about the “plague” of poverty n America. [...]Christianity, Judaism and Islam do all commend helping the poor, of course. But the Book of Deuteronomy, a law book for the ancient Hebrews’ theocracy, does not provide detailed policy guidance for modern political parties. How interesting that left-leaning religious groups can quote from the Old Testament and its supposed counsel about welfare programs and environmental regulations. In contrast, conservative religious groups that cite the Scriptures about their moral and political issues are widely derided as aspiring theocrats.
According to this Deuteronomy-quoting appeal from “people of faith,” it is “immoral to ignore our nation’s most vulnerable populations.” And, from a more utilitarian perspective, “enduring poverty undermines our country’s economic strength and prosperity.” They insist that religious charities are not sufficient to address poverty. So there must be a “serious plan from our political leaders to reduce the number of needy.”
Supposedly Republican Senate Leader Everett Dirksen once derided Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” by tongue-in-cheek claiming that it violated the Bible’s promise that “ye have the poor always with you.” A more serious complaint from the Christian and Jewish perspective about the Welfare State is that it is largely materialistic and often utopian. Can poverty be eliminated? First, poverty is a somewhat relative term. Most poor people in today’s America would not be regarded as poor by much of today’s world, nor by most Americans in earlier decades. Secondly, a free society to some extent allows people the possibility of economic failure. Only a police state can fully mandate the economic choices of individuals. [...]
The left-leaning religious officials, guided by 100 years of statist Social Gospel, want to wage a government-led coercive struggle against “poverty” in the abstract. But most of their religious traditions express God’s love for specific poor people, while emphasizing voluntary and relational charity towards the needy. This historic stance of these religions towards the poor understandably has less appeal to the Religious Left, which often is more preoccupied with political power than with concrete compassion.
NOT THE DEATH OF A NATION BUT THE BIRTH OF TWO:
The death of a nation: The fate of Belgium should interest all Europeans, since what is happening there now could be repeated on a continental scale (Ian Buruma, 8/08/08, Guardian)
[P]erhaps we should all care at least a little, for what is happening in Belgium is unusual, but not at all unique. The Czechs and Slovaks already parted ways, as did the different nations of Yugoslavia. Many Basques would like to break away from Spain, as would many Catalans. Corsicans would love to be rid of France, and many Scots of Britain.Then, of course, there is the Tibetan problem in China, the Chechen problem in Russia, and so on. No doubt some of these peoples would be able to survive perfectly well on their own. But history does seem to suggest that the cumulative effect of states falling apart is seldom positive.
Belgian separatists like to observe that Belgium was never a natural nation-state, but an accident of history. But so are many, perhaps most. The accident in the case of Belgium is usually placed in the early 19th century, the result of Napoleon's European empire collapsing and Dutch arrogance. In fact, one might just as well set the accident in the 16th century, when the Habsburg emperor hung on to the southern Netherlands (today's Belgium) while the Protestant northern provinces broke away.
Be that as it may, nation-states were often formed in the 18th and 19th centuries to promote common interests that transcended cultural, ethnic, linguistic, or religious differences. This was true of Italy and Britain, no less than of Belgium.
The problem now is that interests are no longer the same, or even held in common. The European Union, which actively promotes regional interests, has weakened the authority of national governments. Why rely on London, say the Scots, if Brussels offers greater advantages?
When common interests no longer prevail, language and culture begin to matter more. One reason why Flemish Belgians resent having to prop up the Walloons with their tax money is that they regard them almost as foreigners. Most Flemish readers don't read French-language newspapers or novels, and vice versa. TV stations are separate. And so are schools, universities, and political parties.
Similarly, northern Italians don't like their tax money being used to help the south, but at least they still have a language – more or less – in common, as well as TV stars, a national soccer team, and Silvio Berlusconi. The Belgians only have a king, who is descended, like most European monarchs, from Germans.
Gotta love it when folks who insist that a dark peppered moth is a different species than a light peppered moth can't understand why their fellows are so nationalist.
GONNA NEED A BIGGER ESCALATOR:
Robert Hazard, Songwriter, Dies at 59 (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 8/08/08)
Robert Hazard, a songwriter and musician from Philadelphia who wrote the 1983 Cyndi Lauper hit “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” died on Tuesday in Boston. He was 59 and lived in Old Forge, N.Y. [...]Mr. Hazard, born Robert Rimato, led the band Robert Hazard and the Heroes, a fixture in Philadelphia clubs through the mid-1980s. He wrote that their big breaks came when Kurt Loder, in town to review a Rolling Stones concert, heard them in a bar and they were featured in Rolling Stone magazine. Soon they had an RCA Records contract. His song “Escalator of Life” became a hit soon after.
REBUILDING THE TOWERS:
Still Building His Castles of Sound (BEN RATLIFF, 8/08/08, NY Times)
Sixty years in show business teaches a bandleader how to build a performance arc, or, in the saxophonist Sonny Rollins’s case, a series of them. [...]As the concert passed the 40-minute mark, on “Sonny, Please,” Mr. Rollins broke ground. He started a solo in melodic bursts, then stepped off the song’s grid and went for it. He improvised a few stretchy ballad melodies outside of the song’s harmony and rhythm, and started the steep ascent, passing through a quotation of the “I’m in heaven” melody from Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” eventually running phrases together into smeary blasts. It was quite a climb. Then came a precipitous plunge to earth: a level, muted version of his calypso “St. Thomas.”
On a basic shuffle blues Mr. Rollins’s ambition rose again. He played a tangle of harmonically abstract lines that moved gradually toward blues language, ending in a drilling, repeated honk. He came to the lip of the stage and bent forward so that the bell of his horn broadcast into the front rows. Then another long dip: a restful, almost sluggish version of “In a Sentimental Mood.”
Mr. Rollins had built his two towers, and fairly close together. The last song, Berlin’s “Change Partners,” with a long solo by Mr. Anderson, was graceful but unnecessary. The work was done
DING! DING! DING!:
McCain Catches On: It's All About Obama (Toby Harnden, 8/08/08, Real Clear Politics)
"Oh, the unfairness of it all," McCain aides would lament, measuring the foot and a half of Barack Obama clippings each morning compared to the five inches devoted to their man. They'd bury their heads in their hands when another press avail knocked the Arizona senator off message as he responded to yet another inquiry that basically amounted to: "So what do you think of Barack today?"But then the penny dropped. An astute campaign has the serenity to accept the things it cannot change. McCain's re-jigged team did just that by belatedly recognizing that this election was going to be all about Obama. When the main alternative was that it could be all about McSame and George W. Bush, the Republican's strategists concluded, perhaps that wasn't such a bad thing after all.
Obama has made his extraordinary life story the central plank of his political career. But the constant repetition of the carefully-crafted narrative has begun to wear a bit thin. All the talk about himself can seem a bit, well, self-regarding.
Team McCain now gets this. In a neat judo move - using the weight and momentum of your opponent to throw him to the floor - they hit upon the Celebrity ad, comparing Obama to the vacuous pop icons Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. A bull-session idea that was forced into reality by the hard-charging strategist Steve Schmidt, it was not without risk.
Note the difference between Maverick's campaign making the Unicorn Rider's campaign theme the basis of their critique and the Obama campaign trying to turn the McCain theme on its head?
MORE:
An Antichrist Obama in McCain Ad? (AMY SULLIVAN, 8/07/08, TIME)
As the ad begins, the words "It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him The One" flash across the screen. The Antichrist of the Left Behind books is a charismatic young political leader named Nicolae Carpathia who founds The One World religion (slogan: "We are God") and promises to heal the world after a time of deep division. One of several Obama clips in the ad features the senator saying, "A nation healed, a world repaired. We are the ones that we've been waiting for." [...][Democratic consultant Eric] Sapp knows that the phrasing and images could just be dismissed as a peculiar coincidence. After all, it was Oprah Winfrey who told an Iowa crowd that Obama was "the one!"