Motzei shabbat time-delayed debate blogging
Let me just post my quick reactions before I find out what everyone else in the world has been saying about this debate for the past 27 hours.
I think for both Obama and McCain, the debates are their best opportunity to refute the negative images that their opponents have attached to them over the past nine months. So Obama had to demonstrate that he’s not just an empty suit, and McCain had to untie Bush and the Republican Party from around his neck. In this respect, I think Obama did fairly well by talking of specific policy proposals and by referring to work he had done in the Senate. McCain was clearly taking every opportunity to distance himself from his party, but the issues where he made the distinction were matters of foreign policy, e.g., supporting Clinton’s war in the Balkans.
Unfortunately for McCain, (a) most voters in this election cycle are going to care more about the economy than on foreign affairs, and (b) on the one foreign-policy issue that people care most about, the Iraq war, more people are likely to agree with Obama than with McCain. (As far as I can recall, McCain dared not claim, during the debate, that invading Iraq was a good idea in the first place. It was all surge, surge, surge.)
If I had to score the debate on points, I would therefore give Obama an edge, but not a decisive victory. If Obama were five points behind in the tracking polls, rather than five points ahead, I would be very very nervous.
As they say, a week is a long time in politics. But we’re running out of weeks.
Standing on principle
Even as Congress mulls over a titanic debt-fueled corporate bailout, it’s good to know that some legislators know where to draw the line and demand fidelity to old-fashioned principles of capitalism:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reiterated Tuesday afternoon the importance of giving bankruptcy judges greater flexibility [to adjust mortgage rates of bankrupt homeowners]. He noted that judges can readjust mortgage terms if a borrower facing bankruptcy owns multiple homes.
Republicans say they are willing to curb executive compensation but remain inflexible on greater power for bankruptcy judges. One Republican familiar with the talks said the proposal would undermine the sanctity of financial contracts…
The secret history of the Betamax
Sony v. Universal, also known as the “Betamax case”, is a bit of legal history so beloved of geeks, passed on from grizzled hacker to Slashdot newbie, that it deserves the title of “myth”.
The story goes like this: Once upon a time, an innovative consumer-electronics company called Sony invented a wonderful machine called the Betamax, which could record TV shows on tape. Then a big mean entertainment conglomerate called Universal sued them, saying that people could use the Betamax to break copyright laws and it was Sony’s fault. Universal sued Sony over and over and over again, until finally the United States Supreme Court gave Sony a pat on the head and a big hug and said they hadn’t done anything wrong. And in the years that followed, Universal earned millions and millions of dollars by selling its movies and TV shows on tapes that could be played in Sony’s machines. The moral of this story is that innovative content-liberating technology is good for everyone, even big mean entertainment conglomerates.
There is, however, a small detail of history that didn’t make it into the myth.
At the same time that Sony was developing the Betamax, Universal’s parent company, MCA, was developing a playback-only video medium, the laserdisc. MCA wanted to partner with Sony on developing laserdisc playback machines and convince Sony to discontinue the Betamax. So, in September 1976, top executives of MCA and Sony met to discuss videodisk development. At the very end of their discussion, the president of MCA and Universal threatened to sue Sony if the Betamax were not discontinued or modified. Akio Morita, steeped in the Japanese way of doing business, was certain that MCA would not follow through on its threat; as he told a colleague, “friends don’t sue”. Except, of course, they did.
If Universal’s negotiators had been savvy enough to shut down the videocassette industry without suing, or if they had swayed one more Supreme Court justice, then they still would be collecting millions and millions of dollars from home video sales. They just would have been comforted knowing that their customers’ home video equipment used a non-recordable medium.
The moral of this story is that big mean entertainment conglomerates are not always as dumb as they look.
source: Bargaining for Advantage
The POW-In-Chief
I guess I have to say something about McCain’s speech now, too.
- In the biopic preceding the speech, the narrator told the story of a massive and deadly fire aboard the USS Forrestal caused by an accidental missile launch. Somehow, the narrator declared, McCain survived. Perhaps, the narrator declared, it was because he had more work to be done. And the Republicans accuse Democrats of setting Obama up as a Messiah-figure? I am rubber and you are glue…
- Did you know that McCain used to be a POW? And that he was in hell? And in a box for five years? And that he was dumped in a cell? And that he was a prisoner in another country? I’m impressed by how the biopic author and the speechwriter were able to rephrase the same concept in so many different ways to fill up so many minutes. We saw and heard in vivid detail about McCain’s capture, his imprisonment, his endurance, and how it made him grow as a person.
- Not so much detail, though, on what he’s going to do if he’s elected. There was the standard Republican wish list: lower taxes, lower spending, school “choice”, and “culture of life”. There was a list of things that probably appeal to many voters but seem incompatible with lower spending: job training for people whose jobs have gone overseas, more pay for good teachers, and every alternative-energy source that Obama supports. (Plus, of course, “drill now”. I think “drill now” got as much applause as “culture of life”. Remember, ladies, if you abort that fetus, you deprive your country of a future offshore-drilling-rig technician.)
- Before delivering that standard Republican wish list, McCain insisted that he’s different from all those Republicans who have been corrupted by “Washington”. He’s a “maverick”. But he provided even less detail about what, exactly, he has done to distinguish himself from those bad Republicans. For example, he took credit for fighting “big spenders in both parties” without identifying any big expense that he fought against. Given McCain’s recent return to Republican orthodoxy, his boast deserves to be compared against his recent record.
- Oh, and McCain demonstrated his bipartisanality by saying “Instead of rejecting good ideas because we didn’t think of them first, let’s use the best ideas from both sides.” Did he name a good idea that came from the Democratic side? (Say, “nominate a woman for the vice-presidential position”?) Of course not.
- “I fight for Bill and Sue Nebe from Farmington Hills, Michigan, who lost their real estate investments in the bad housing market.” See, Democrats fight for people who lost their homes. Republicans fight for people who lost their real estate investments.
- The paragraphs about Iraq, the surge, and Georgia seem to be repeats of earlier press releases and I can’t think of anything to say about them other than “yadda yadda yadda”.
- George W. Bush was not mentioned by name, only by title.
- McCain’s tone was folksy and mellow. I fear that in the swing states, that tone will get more attention than the content.
This week’s sleep deficit has been brought to you by the Republican National Convention. Maybe next time I should liveblog, just like the pros.
Disorganized thoughts on last night's speeches
There’s a long and linky post about Governor Palin that I’ve been wanting to compose, but last night, instead of writing that, I watched the Giuliani and Palin speeches. I know I’m not the intended audience for these things, but here are my reactions:
- Do we now have a bipartisan consensus that it’s shameful to criticize a mother of young children who works outside the home? (Pause for raucous laughter.)
- Both Giuliani and Palin pronounced “community organizer” with the tone of contempt that Republicans usually reserve for “trial attorney”, “American Civil Liberties Union”, or “French”. As osewalrus puts it: “because getting a large group of fractious people motivated and organized around a common goal on a non-existent budget is work for pussies, right?”
- Quoth Palin: “Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involved. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” But she never told the crowd what her responsibilities as mayor were… perhaps because in her case, they included raising the city sales tax, hiring a DC lobbyist to get pork from the Federal government, and putting the city over $18 million in debt.
- I bet a lot of people watching the speech on TV wondered why “Styrofoam Greek columns” was an applause line. It’s the sort of insider reference that alienates the outsiders.
- A prime-time convention speech is an opportunity to appeal to swing voters. If I had been Palin’s speechwriter, I would have scoured her biography for specific examples of her reformist actions and padded that into a half-hour “Mrs. Smith Goes To Juneau” story that she could tell the cameras. They could always save the red-meat attacks for the time slots where independent voters are less likely to be watching, and of course the folks in the stadium would have cheered enthusiastically for Palin reading the phone book. So why didn’t they take that route? Is her record really that thin? Is the campaign staff too unfamiliar with her record to compose such a speech? Does McCain need to energize his base that desperately?
- Instead, we had some fire-breathing speeches that, as Sean of FiveThirtyEight.com pointed out, will motivate Democrats to work their asses off.
- Both speeches rehashed the attacks on Obama that the Clinton and McCain campaigns have been running all year. If those arguments haven’t pulled McCain to a decisive victory in the polls yet, why should they do it now? Contrast that with Obama’s acceptance speech, where he counteracted the image of himself as an empty suit by talking fluently about specific policies.
- I think the crowd’s reaction to Palin should kill off any speculation that she’ll be bumped off the ticket.
- Moments after the speech ended, NBC’s announcer reported that when Palin boasted of turning down the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark, she had been, shall we say, not entirely accurate. I don’t know how many people heard the fact-check over the crowd noise, but congratulations, NBC, for that moment of actual journalism.
PS: The Obama campaign’s fact-check of Palin’s speech has been reposted here.
Paranoia in full flour
The Boston Police Department, which took such heroic efforts to save our city from illuminated cartoon characters, has some competition:
NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge.
The sprinkled powder forced hundreds to evacuate an IKEA furniture store Thursday….
Mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said the city plans to seek restitution from the Salchows, who are due in court Sept. 14.
“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”
Remember, citizens, if it’s not an American flag, it’s probably a bomb.
Bar sinister
Ha`aretz, covering the eviction of some Jewish families from an illegal settlement in Hebron, quoted Gershon Bar-Kochba, one of the residents who tried to resist eviction. The name also appeared in this New York Times article from 1989: “Gershon Bar Kochba, a seminary student from Hebron, was suspected of leading a group who opened fire on Palestinians in Hebron…” And this article on the Hebron Jewish community’s Web site laments that Gershon Bar-Kochba had to post a 25,000-shekel1 bond in order to bail out a 14-year-old settler, while Arab suspects were routinely released on their own recognizance2.
OK, this guy appears to be something of a macher in Hebron. What astounds me is that he carries the name of the leader of the last Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire. That revolt was thoroughly crushed by the Romans, after which all the remaining Jews were exiled from Judea, the province was renamed “Syria Palestina”, many Jewish practices (such as Torah study and Shabbat) were prohibited, and many rabbis were martyred. What kind of yeshiva bocher treats a guy like this as a role model? Does he learn from some Bizzarro-Talmud in which it says that God destroyed our Temple and exiled us from our homeland because we were insufficiently ruthless to our enemies?
via ongoing
1 Approximately US$6,000.
2 The article presented this as one example of how the Israeli government was treating Jewish settlers in Hebron more harshly than the Arabs. I mentioned this to my wife, and she said, “Well, they should. God Himself does.” After all, she went on, the Moslems only have the seven Noachide commandments to observe, while we have 613…of course, we can’t observe all of them today…and one of the reason we can’t observe all of them today is the misguided zealotry of Jews like the original Bar-Kochba.
Converting the unfaithful: a primer
Once upon a time when I was an undergraduate, I wrote a series of articles for the school paper (I, II, III, IV) about the Boston Church of Christ (BCC), a religious cult that had spread like dandelions across local campuses. Two key points of their doctrine were that the only real Christians were the ones baptized into their network of churches, and that the quality of a Christian’s relationship with God is directly proportional to his or her success at making converts. Motivated by those beliefs, organized in an Amway-style pyramid system, and using some high-pressure sales tactics, the church racked up exponential growth for about ten years, until attrition caught up with them.
One of the folks I interviewed for the series was a dean and a Christian pastor, who said that the BCC’s approach to making converts was all wrong. The early Christians, he said, attracted people by example. Flavius would see that Marcellus was good to his family, honest in business, etc., etc., and also hear that Marcellus worshipped some strange new god called “Jesus”; thus, Flavius became interested in Christianity. Imagine that—converting other people to your religion by your own exemplary behavior. What a tedious chore! You can’t just spend a few hours a week lecturing the heathen about how you are right and they are wrong, rattling off the talking points that you have carefully memorized in response to their well-meaning but ignorant questions. You have to earn respect from the people around you, and hope that respect for you as a person will lead to respect for your faith.
But, friends and neighbors, I am here to testify that the dean’s strategy actually works. I am an Orthodox Jew today, in part, because of some of the Orthodox and frum-Conservative folks I met: people I liked, people I respected, people whom I identified with. And none of those folks were stumping for Chabad, Aish ha-Torah, or any other “bring non-Orthodox Jews to frumkeit” organization.
By contrast, let me present a case study in how not to proselytize:
U.S. Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, he didn’t realize he would get a hard sell for Christian fundamentalism along with treatment for his kidney stones.
Miller, 46, an Orthodox Jew, said he was repeatedly proselytized by hospital chaplains and staff in attempts to convert him to Christianity during three hospitalizations over the past two years.
He said he went hungry each time because the hospital wouldn’t serve him kosher food, and the staff refused to contact his rabbi, who could have brought him something to eat.
...
Over the past two years, Miller said, he has been asked over and over by the Iowa City VA medical center’s staff within its offices, clinics and wards, “You mean you don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah?” and “Is it just Orthodox Jews who deny Jesus?” He said one staffer told him, “I don’t understand; how can you not believe in Jesus; he’s the Messiah of the Jews, too, you know.”
If any of the Christians who made these comments think they were bringing Miller closer to their religion, they are deluding themselves. At best, they were annoying busybodies, like folks who lecture overweight strangers about what to eat. At worst, they were showing one another their loyalty to the “Christian” tribe by harrassing someone who was not a member. (And if Miller’s case ever turns into a lawsuit, we are sure to hear other members of this tribe wail and gnash their teeth about how they are being “persecuted”.)
It is not my place, of course, to tell those Christians how to interpret the tenets of their own religion. I’d just like to encourage my fellow frummies to hold themselves to a higher standard. If it’s too much work to act in a way that conspicuously brings credit to your religion, at least try not to make it look bad, OK?
via .common sense
He also told the NAACP that he was a great dancer
Every once in a while, I hear someone remark, with sadness or frustration, that the GOP is more Good For The Jews™ than the Democratic Party, so why do Jews still overwhelmingly vote for Democrats?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present Exhibit DCXXII: Tommy Thompson, Republican, former Governor of Wisconsin, former Secretary of Health and Human Services, currently running for President, speaking to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism:
I’m in the private sector and for the first time in my life I’m earning money. You know that’s sort of part of the Jewish tradition.
PS: Tommy Thompson, the former Governor of Wisconsin, should not be confused with Fred Thompson, the former Senator from Tennessee who plays the DA on Law and Order.
via Matthew Yglesias and TAPPED
Lack o’ the Irish
Four years ago, the Boston Globe distinguished itself by its bombshell revelation that John Kerry (our junior senator; you may have heard of him) wasn’t really Irish. Had Kerry ever claimed to be Irish? Umm… no. But a few people (reporters? aides?) could be found who had accidentally claimed that Kerry was Irish, and the senator hadn’t corrected them.
Thank God we have newspapers like the Globe that stand ready to protect voters from such sinister fraud. Perhaps those crusading reporters will take an interest in this.
Pandering or deception? We report; you decide.
via TAPPED
for a related story, see Digby
