The plan: Drive to San Diego on Friday for an Old 97’s show that night. Explore the Zoo all day on Saturday. Relax at a nearby tavern Kristie found with a wide selection of rare specialty beers. Then head to Pacific Beach and watch the sun set over the ocean.
The reality: The show was good, but standing next to the stage for five hours killed my poor feet. The Zoo was so exhausting (and hot!) that we left by 2pm. The tavern was shockingly loud and packed for a Saturday afternoon. And by the time we had an early dinner near the beach, we were both so tired that we left well before the sun could even think of setting (on the longest day of the year, naturally). We ended up in a motel in El Centro off I-8, passed out by ten.
Ah well. We still had fun, even if it left me feeling so very, very old.
Catching up on some tabbed items after a week. My blog is suddenly in danger of becoming all-McCain, all-YouTube, all the time, but I like this clip. I’ve read elsewhere of McCain’s “YouTube problem.” This is a good example.
First problem: when he’s speaking to the people rather than millionaire news pundits who treat his every word like a new book of the Maverick Bible, McCain is actually really uncharismatic. Seriously, I’m surprised the GOP nominated someone who can’t even read from a teleprompter convincingly.
But more importantly, McCain has taken on so many personas and so many different positions over the years — staying in the media’s eye the whole time — that it’s extremely easy to find video of him saying exactly the opposite of whatever he’s saying now. (He’s a Goldwater conservative! No wait, he’s caught in a finance scandal, so now he’s a reformist! No wait, now he’s running against Bush, so he’s a moderate maverick flirting with Democratic positions! No wait, now he’s a Bush-supporting neoconservative! No wait, now he’s an anti-Bush neoconservative!)
To wit…
Meanwhile, the always-invaluable Matt Taibbi reports from the McCain speech that provided the footage above. He’s billed as the new Hunter S. Thompson, but he’s more funny and less druggy, I think. I’ve been meaning to buy Taibbi’s new book for a while now, and I finally ordered it tonight.
The McCain campaign responded with a call in which McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser Randy Schuenemann said, “Once again we have seen that Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a September 10th mindset.”
Sept. 10 is, of course, my birthday. By strange coincidence, it is also Kristie’s.
In my lifelong experience, the Sept. 10th Mindset involves some or all of the following:
Days off from work.
Parties.
Cake.
Drinking.
Celebratory sex.
People giving me free stuff wrapped in shiny paper.
If Obama has a Sept. 10th Mindset, then I wholeheartedly approve this platform. Upon his election, I insist that he follow through on these campaign promises!
Last week’s best news was the Supreme Court’s restoration of habeas corpus. The scary thing about it was that a decision that should have been a 9-0 gimme — restoring one of the founding rights of non-tyrannical governments going back centuries — squeaked past on a vote of 5-4.
Check out these dissenting quotes:
Chief Justice John Roberts in dissent wrote that the American people “lost a bit more control over the conduct of this nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges.”
And Justice Antonin Scalia wrote of the ruling, “Most tragically it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving in a civilian court … that evidence supports the confinement of each and every prisoner.”
Roberts thinks the Supreme Court shouldn’t have a say in the treatment of prisoners? He sounds like one of those Republicans who gets elected on a “government is terrible” platform, then proceeds to run a terrible government. Meanwhile, yes, Scalia, that is the entire point of habeas corpus — we DO need a reason to keep people in prison. You know, like evidence of a crime.
Every time I decide not to go to San Diego Comic-Con, there’s an event that makes me massively regret that decision. This year?
We now have full confirmation of the upcoming panel at Comic-Con in San Diego, Friday, July 25, 7:15 p.m.
On the panel will be: Trace Beaulieu, Paul Chaplin, Frank Conniff, Bill Corbett, Joel Hodgson, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Bridget Nelson, Mike Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl and J. Elvis Weinstein. Wow.
Speaking of The Daily Show, the Post just profiled Adam Chodikoff, the guy who finds all those ironic clips and quotes stating the opposite of whatever a pundit or politician is saying now. He’s responsible for a massive amount of the show’s satirical zing, yet never got credit before now.
The article also gives his job a label: “investigative humorist.” I think that’s my new dream job, right behind “starting shortstop, St. Louis Cardinals.”
And now the main course. These facts are now part of the Senate record, courtesy of Phase II of the Intel Report:
–Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
–Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
–Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
–Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
–The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
–The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.
And yet, according to David Broder, the Dean of the DC Press Corps, this is still less criminal than what Bill Clinton did in the 90s. Lied about a blowjob? Resign! Lied about the threat posed by a country targeted for invasion? Just a “policy dispute.”
My new desktop wallpaper is Sunset on Mars. Not because it’s spectacularly gorgeous or anything. In fact, I’m kind of amused that this panoramic photograph of a sunset on an alien world just looks sort of dull and grey…
I don’t normally do celeb gossip, but this amuses me. At this rate, David Tennant will sleep his way through the entire female cast and crew by March 2009. I’m also a little jealous that they both look even better in person than they do on TV.
The subject of this NY Sun article — that gas prices are causing retail shortages of bikes in NYC — is interesting enough. But the real reason I’m flagging it here is that I might want to remember that, when I buy a commuter bike someday, the Jamis hybrid is apparently a popular model.
