Friday, October 12, 2007

George Clooney as Howard Dean

"Hey honey! Guess who plays me in the movie of my life!"

DiCaprio, Clooney to star in movie about Howard Dean: Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney are to star in a film loosely based on the rise and fall of presidential hopeful Howard Dean. The Warner Bros production will be based on a stage-play written by Beau Willimon, a former assistant on the Dean campaign.

Entitled Farragut North, after a Washington Metro station in the heart of the lobbyist district, the film sounds like darker version of Joe Roth's Primary Colours. It tells the tale of a youthful communications guru working for a principled but unorthodox politician who finds himself undone by a slick and corrupt Washington establishment. Currently in rehearsal, Willimon's stage-play is set to open on Broadway in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Mike Nichols is directing.

...

DiCaprio and Clooney will produce the film as well as starring. It is believed that DiCaprio will play the young communications chief while Clooney stars as the Dean surrogate.

Congrats to President Gore!

I love this picture. That's the kind of office I would love to have. Three(!) huge flat screens.

What a geek! (and I say that in a nice way)

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Speaking of vetting

Atrios catches the similarity in talking points between the McConnell office email and John Roberts on CNN:

The email from Monday:

Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?

John Roberts Some person on CNN, ahead of the curve, Thursday:

I think in this instance what happened was the Democrats didn’t do as much of a vetting as they could have done on this young man, his situation, his family.

Awesome.

Roberts must have been off not to have caught the sense that the story had turned sharply against the Republicans on this well before he went on the air and opened his trap.

Busted

Think Progress finds solid evidence that the office of Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was on the early bandwagon of the campaign to smear Graeme Frost but then jumped off once they quickly realized how politically stupid it was.

This isn't evidence that the smear started in McConnell's office. But it shows that that they didn't have enough humanity to realize how wrong the story was right from the beginning. It took the growing shit storm to make them realize that it was politically radioactive.

Could the progressive truth machine finally be catching up with the right wing wurlizter?

Peacock Feathers

Why is The Drudge Report so popular that journalists might actively seek to get links from it?

I suspect it has something to do with why peacocks have such enormous tail feathers.

As a question of pure survivability, male peacocks are disadvantaged by having to drag around these enormous feathers. They certainly make it harder to get away from predators. So why do it? Because it's what attracts females. But why does it attract females? What about such a huge display makes a female go "oooooh! I want some of that!"?

The answer becomes clearer when you think that the primary goal of a female peacock is to propagate their genes as much as possible. That means they have to have sons that are good at propagating their genes. And how do you do that? By producing sons that emphasize those things that females find attractive.

A large tail feather display is attractive to females because they are attractive to females. As long as the net benefit of increasing attractiveness is not outweighed by increased vulnerability to predatory attack, the elaborate displays will continue.

(Hat tip to Richard Dawkins and "The Selfish Gene" which I just happen to be reading right now. I hope I have given his thoughts a just summary.)

So, how does this explain the popularity of Drudge?

As I suggested before, a lot of mainstream journalists may be actively seeking links from Drudge because doing so increases their hit count and thus makes them look good in the eyes of their wagemasters. But why do they seek those links? Because Drudge is popular. But why is he popular? Because so many are paying attention to what he is linking to in order to find out what attracts his links.

Drudge has reached that magical point where his success is self-sustaining (so long as he doesn't do something stupid that drives people away).

There's a lesson here for liberal and progressives who want the media to give their causes a fair shake. That will happen when the journalists begin to value the links that liberals and progressives can give them. When they do, they will begin "Atrios Trolling" and "Kos Trolling" and "Media Matters Trolling".

To a certain extent this is happening already. A link from Atrios is a valuable commodity in certain circles, so there is an incentive to write something that he will approve of. (Ironically, this may also have the perverse incentive of encouraging certain journalists to troll for Wanker-Of-The-Day. A hits a hit regardless of the sentiment behind the hit.)

Humans are such crazy buggers. It's why I love them so much.

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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

That's Rich

I always find it useful, when discussing relative economic positions, to ask "relative to whom"? A society that emphasizes being richer than your neighbor will be a lot different than a society that emphasizes being richer than you were 10 years ago.

For one thing, the latter society at least offers the potential for everyone to be happy.

Once a Liar, Always a Liar?

Camille Paglia: "This kind of partisan rancor and mutual recrimination are the sad legacy of two self-destructive administrations in a row. Bill Clinton's lies about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky paralyzed the government and tainted his legacy, while George Bush's poor judgment and managerial ineptitude have mired us in an endless, brutal war with little chance for a happy ending."

Ah yes. Lying about an affair is the same as lying about a war. So a pox on both their houses!

Look, I'm not enamored of the Clintons. Hillary is not my first (or second (or third)) choice. But this ridiculous attempt to paint them as somehow morally equivalent to Bush is absurd on the face of it.

Not that this idea isn't starting to jell in people's minds (both in the public and within the beltway, on both the left and the right). The elite media's acceptance of President Hillary as a distinct possibility may simply be because of a false belief that she will be the competent George W. Bush. The dirty secret that few of them want to admit, but it leaks out in all their discussion of "how things should be", is that the they generally approve of the political philosophy of Bush. They just think he is a moron who couldn't fight his way out of a paper sack.

In Clinton they (think) they see someone who is a fellow traveler with Bush, but who (at least through osmosis with her husband) may actually be able to govern.

I honestly don't know if they are correct in this assessment. That lack of certainty on this is one of the big reasons I am so uncomfortable with her. Hillary may indeed have some of the same flawed ideas as Bush about how America should project its power in the world. But I've seen little evidence that she would follow the same course of lying-to-us-for-or-own-good.

And to suggest that Bill's lying about an affair is evidence of such a tendency is, again, absurd.

The coming meltdown

I've been thinking for a few weeks now, and said publicly as much in several locales, that if Hillary (or any Democrat for that matter) wins the Presidency then whoever is Veep will quite possibly become President sometime in the following four years.

Posts like this prove my point. There are some seriously unhinged people out there who have been fed a steady diet of hate by the GOP smear machine. If a Democrat gets into the White House, especially Hillary, they will achieve levels of bat-shit insanity that will make Oswald seem like a piker.

The budget for the Secret Service should be doubled, if not tripled.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Drudge Trolling

Brian Beutler: "It's widely understood that writers and editors value an article's penetration as much as they do its quality. It's the very dynamic that keeps us stuck with Maureen Dowd. I know that writers at our political dailies here in DC are often more excited about the possibility of a Drudge link than they are for the approval of their smart, principled peers, because that link represents their value added to the business side of their publication. It's an incentive that can do wonders for quality if your patron is Duncan Black or another smart and popular media critic."

Here's an explanation for "Drudge Trolling" (mainstream journalists who actively seek links from The Drudge Report) that never occurred to me. It's always seemed to me that the explanation that the mainstream media is just right-wing by nature was to simplistic an explanation. But if the a success by a journalist is measured by the number of "hits" they get and you can get a great hit aggregator like Drudge to link to you, then it makes sense that mainstream journalist will inevitably lean their stories towards something that Drudge will find favorable.

So, when said journalists claim that Drudge "rules their world" it doesn't mean they agree with Drudge politically. It just means that they value a link from him more than any other.

Of course, the more you subconsciously troll for Drudge links the more you will rationalize this by adopting a Drudge-like view of the world.

Monday, October 08, 2007

It's all a game with these people

I strongly suspect that the main reason the Republican's keep asking for these blanket wavers is not because they think they are needed but because they know it will make a lot of Democrats balk. They can then use that balking as a political shotgun against Democrats in the upcoming election.

It also drives a wedge between Democrats.

It's a win-win proposition for the GOP.