It’s important for the government to bail out GM, so that GM can continue as one of the main sponsors of talk radio diatribes against government (and government bailouts).

… reminds me of a small irony from last summer that I never got around to blogging: at the same time all the radio talkers were mocking Obama for suggesting that we keep our tires inflated, one of the carmakers was pushing a brand new innovation — self-monitoring tires which inform you when they need inflating. So you’d go directly from a rant about the idiocy of thinking you can improve mileage by keeping your tires properly inflated to a commercial about how you can definitely improve mileage by keeping your tires properly inflated. In one absolutely classic moment I caught on my car radio late one night, Laura Ingraham was the ranter — and was also the person who read the immediately subsequent commercial copy.

Sorry, gang. It turns out Sarah Palin isn’t THAT dumb. On the plus side, she refuses to go away, so at least we’ll have that trainwreck to enjoy for a little while longer. It’s amazing to think that Palin has been in the national spotlight for less than three months and she’s already gone from serious vice-presidential contender to the sort of “why won’t she go away?” level of fame that’s usually reserved for former reality show contestants.

UPDATE : My bad. It turns out I misread the article regarding the Plain hoax. She really is THAT dumb. Sorry folks. Blogging and NyQuil don’t mix.

… just described one of his sponsors, Stamps.com, as an example of “an individual who thought, hey, I can do this better than the federal government.”

And that’s got to be conservativism/libertarianism in a nutshell. Figuring out how to profit off systems and infrastructure set up by the federal government is defined as “doing things better than the federal government.”

It’s that special brand of rugged individualism conservatives talk so much about, the kind which mostly turns out to be neither rugged nor individual.

Heck, maybe we ought to eliminate the USPS entirely, and see if Stamps.com is willing to carry a letter from one end of the country to the other and deliver it to the recipient’s door for less than fifty cents.

Olbermann had Thomas Friedman as a guest tonight, and treated him as a respected commentator … and now I’m watching Rachel Maddow interview Ana Marie Cox.

Sigh.

Tony Ortega explains the three fads which gripped the American imagination in the early nineteenth century, and how a young grifter named Joseph Smith wove them all together into a new religion. It’s completely fascinating, and well worth five minutes of your time. Go, read.

I picked up “The Book of Vice,” by Peter Sagal last night. It’s one of those geeky-writer-explores-the-seamy-underside-of-American-life things, but very well done, often laugh-out-loud funny. In a chapter on “Swinging” (subtitled “Dinner Parties Gone Horribly Wrong”), the author describes his evening at a swinger’s party, at which he and his wife are shunned after they make it clear to everyone who approaches them that they are there as observers, not participants.

I don’t blame them: this April night was the last party at the Swinger’s Shack, maybe for the summer, maybe for the year, maybe forever. There was no time to waste with people like me. But still: in a lifetime in which I’ve been to all kinds of sexual marketplaces — bars, parties — this was the first time that I was going to get ignored because I wouldn’t put out.

Sagal is the host of the weekend NPR show “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me,” which I was actually on once, several years back, in the segment where a “celebrity” (and we use the term loosely here) is quizzed about the week’s news. (I’d run into Roy Blount the day before at some event and he’d asked me to fill in for a last-minute cancellation.) Unfortunately I was less familiar with the show then, and I think I might have been coming down with a cold. In fact, let’s just say I was coming down with a cold, because it makes the memory somewhat easier to bear. I’ve done a lot of radio over the years but I didn’t exactly distinguish myself that morning: the high point, as I recall it, was when I told a long pointless anecdote on live national radio about an apartment I had once lived in — it pains me to finish this sentence — which became infested with ants.

Oh yes, I was on fire.

(In fairness, the question which led to that moment did have something to do with, you know, ants. But still.)

Anyway in the intervening years I’ve become a big fan of the show. If they ever invite me back on — and oddly, they haven’t so far — I vow to be much, much funnier than last time. Which shouldn’t be too hard, considering.

I’ve been traveling around the world again since August, and the subject of the U.S. elections has come up nearly every day, everywhere I’ve gone.

When people find out I’m American, it’s often the first thing they bring up. I try to be the last one present to express an opinion, since the point of travel is to learn what other people are thinking. That way, I can be pretty sure that whatever my new friend is saying, they’re not saying it just to politely agree.

And after three months of conversations in more than a dozen countries on three continents, to my knowledge, I’ve met exactly one non-Anerican who supported McCain. One.

Exactly one guy — a cab driver in New Zealand — seemed as convinced of McCain’s righteousness and Obama’s impending evil reign as any Palin rally deadender might be. One guy. (Please excuse the Tom Friedman-ness of citing a taxi conversation of evidence of anything. That’s just who the one guy happened to be.)

Near as I can remember, everybody else I’ve met so far — in France, Hong Kong, the Emirates, Indonesia, Korea, Australia, England, Malaysia, wherever — has been neutral to pro-Obama. (There was also a stretch in China where virtually no one outside the expat community broached politics with me, for what seem obvious reasons.) The overwhelming majority were clearly hoping for an Obama win.

So my direct experience jibes with photos of street celebrations that circulated the day after the election. For this very brief moment, the planet as a whole probably really is a more hopeful place.

But only for a moment. Now the more difficult part begins.

Has anyone been discussing starting to put donations for Obama’s 2012 run in escrow, to be released upon the accomplishment of certain goals—eg, on Iraq, health care, energy, etc.?

It would take a ton of effort and wrangling to set up. And I haven’t thought it through at all, particularly the various legalities involved. Just off the top of my head, I think you’d have to set up a vote on whether he’d succeeded and the money could be released. I’d also guess you’d might have to require each person to specify a second choice organization for the money to go if Obama fails, so they wouldn’t just get it back and be able send it to the campaign anyway.

(See also this post by Micah Sifry about what’s going to happen to MyBarackObama and its tools.)

In regards to Joe Lieberman, as much of a dickhead as he has been, I don’t think it’s a good idea in the long run to seek punitive measures against him for his support of John McCain. It’ll just give him another reason to be self-righteous and make the Democratic leadership look petty. Having said that, as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Joe Lieberman has done nothing. It’s not that he’s been ineffective, but that he hasn’t tried to accomplish anything. No oversight, no hearings, no subpoenas, nothing. Considering the breadth of the crimes that have been committed by the Bush Administration that fall under the jurisdiction of Lieberman’s leadership, the lack of oversight is unconscionable. That he let his support of George W. Bush overshadow his responsibilities as a Senator isn’t just a stab in the back to his constituents, it’s proof that he’s refused to perform the duties that he swore he would. For that reason alone, he should be removed from any leadership posts within the Senate. The responsibilities that Joe Lieberman has abdicated are too important to leave in the hands of someone who’s unwilling to work hard for the American people.

OpenLeft has set up a petition to John Podesta and Michael Strautmanis of the Obama transition team calling on Obama not to appoint Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary. As they describe, there are many reasons Summers would be an horrendous (although funny!) choice.

MORE: Don’t miss this chummy note from Summers to Ken Lay when Summers became Treasury Secretary. Note the handwritten PS: “I’ll keep my eye on power deregulation and energy market infrastructure issues.”

Four years and one day ago, after George W. Bush defeated John Kerry by 2 million popular votes and 34 electoral votes, he held a press conference in which he declared :

I feel it is necessary to move an agenda that I told the American people I would move. Something refreshing about coming off an election, even more refreshing since we all got some sleep last night, but there’s — you go out and you make your case, and you tell the people this is what I intend to do. And after hundreds of speeches and three debates and interviews and the whole process, where you keep basically saying the same thing over and over again, that when you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view, and that’s what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as the President, now let’s work to — and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let’s work together.

And it’s one of the wonderful — it’s like earning capital. You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That’s what happened in the — after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I’ve earned capital in this election — and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on

Yesterday, Barack Obama beat John McCain by more than 7 million popular votes and at least 186 electoral votes. That’s a lot of political capital and he earned it the old-fashioned way, by bringing people together :

When it was over, more than 120 million pulled a lever or mailed a ballot, and the system could barely accommodate the demands of Extreme Democracy. Obama won more votes than anyone else in U.S. history, the biggest Democratic victory since Lyndon Johnson crushed another Arizona Senator 44 years ago. Obama won men, which no Democrat had managed since Bill Clinton. He won 54% of Catholics, 66% of Latinos, 68% of new voters — a multicultural, multigenerational movement that shatters the old political ice pack. He let loose a deep blue wave that washed well past the coasts and the college towns, into the South through Virginia and Florida, the Mountain West with Colorado and New Mexico, into the Ohio Valley and the Midwestern battlegrounds: you could almost walk from Maine to Minnesota without getting your feet wet in a red state. After months of mapmaking all the roads to 270, Obama tore right past with ease.

As the New York Times showed, Obama’s victory wasn’t just isolated to big cities on either coast.



Barack Obama ran on a platform of fundamental change to the way our government works and serves its people. As such, his overwhelming victory is a clear mandate for the changes that he advocated : healthcare reform, ending the war in Iraq, and most importantly, an Apollo-like alternative energy project which he described in a recent interview with Joe Klein :

The biggest problem with our energy policy has been to lurch from crisis to trance. And what we need is a sustained, serious effort. Now, I actually think the biggest opportunity right now is not just gas prices at the pump but the fact that the engine for economic growth for the last 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20, and that was consumer spending. I mean, basically, we turbo-charged this economy based on cheap credit. Whatever else we think is going to happen over the next certainly 5 years, one thing we know, the days of easy credit are going to be over because there is just too much de-leveraging taking place, too much debt both at the government level, corporate level and consumer level. And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that’s going to be my number one priority when I get into office

Unlike 2004, in which George W. Bush misinterpreted his victory as a mandate to privatize social security, Barack Obama has been very open about his intentions for this entire campaign. Yes, Obama has promised to work across the aisle (a promise I think he intends to keep, btw), but he did so while running on a platform that was, if John McCain and his Republican allies are to be believed, “liberal” and “socialist”.

As John McCain was quick to point out in their final debate, Obama wasn’t running against George W. Bush, he was running against John McCain, a straight-talking Republican “maverick”. If John McCain is the centrist reformer that he claimed to be, then the contrast between McCain and Obama is even more stark. Given their consummate differences, shouldn’t the fact that voters chose Barack Obama mean something?

Now that he has won the presidency in a landslide, Barack Obama is under no obligation to govern like a centrist or temper his policy goals to accommodate a point-of-view that the American people have decisively rejected. Obama won. Elections have consequences.