brainrow

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean, on returning to earth after walking on the moon:

Since that time, I have not complained about the weather one single time. I’m glad there is weather. I’ve not complained about traffic. I’m glad there’s people around.

One of the things that I did when I got home, I went down to shopping centers, and I’d just go around there, get an ice cream cone or somethin’, and just watch the people go by, and think: “Boy, we’re lucky to be here. Why do people complain about the earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden.”

(This is from the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon.)

Conservatives talk in code:

During a speech before the National Rifle Association convention Friday afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky, former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee — who has endorsed presumptive GOP nominee John McCain — joked that an unexpected offstage noise was Democrat Barack Obama looking to avoid a gunman.

“That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he’s getting ready to speak,” said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. “Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”

Guess he had to add that last sentence, in case anyone failed to get the signal.

I kinda liked Huckabee during the primaries. He’s very conservative, but he didn’t seem mean-spirited. So I’m guessing he just wants to be surrounded by Secret Service agents. After a remark like this, he might get his wish.

At first I was amused by this post from This Modern World:

If John McCain was hoping to use his speech at the Republican convention in September to try to woo working class voters away from Obama, he might have hit a snag. It seems that McCain’s speech (which traditionally happens on the final night of the convention) will be happening at the same time of the NFL season opener between the Superbowl champs NY Giants and the Washington Redskins.

On reflection, I think this is part of a massive conspiracy by the NFL to get McCain elected. I mean, if people actually heard his convention speech, what chance would he have? The NFL is helping to hush up the Republican agenda, and this year there’s no greater service they could render for the Republican Party.

Josh Marshall:

Every time the president does something like this, the Democratic nominee needs to point out again that President Bush bungled the country into a disastrous war that has damaged America, failed to find Osama bin Laden, funded it all [by] driving us further into debt to China and various Gulf sheikdoms. And McCain supports it all 100%.

Always stay on the offensive.

Question: Could George W. Bush have done more damage to the country if harming the country had been his actual intent?

Follow-up question: How do we know it wasn’t?

John Gruber makes an interesting point about Apple:

Apple doesn’t wait for someone else to knock one of their hit products off its throne or slowly run it into the ground (cf. the Motorola Razr) — they do it themselves. For six years pundits have been declaring that competitors would “soon” catch up to the iPod, but the iPod has never been a static target — over the same six years Apple has released significant new iPods every year.

But it is frustrating, buying the latest best-of-breed product in order to have bragging rights over all the poor saps who don’t have the latest, coolest thing, and then seeing it made less cool when the same company releases something even cooler only a few months later.

The Daily Show on what went wrong for Obama in West Virgina (some crude humor):

If Obama’s looking for a fighting running mate, maybe he should consider Joe Biden:

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden, D-Delaware, called President Bush’s comments accusing Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats of wanting to appease terrorists “bulls**t” and said if the president disagrees so strongly with the idea of talking to Iran then he needs to fire his secretaries of State and Defense, both of whom Biden said have pushed to sit down with the Iranians.

“This is bullsh*t. This is malarkey. This is outrageous. Outrageous for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement,” Biden said angrily in a brief interview just off the Senate floor.

“He’s the guy who’s weakened us. He’s the guy that’s increased the number of terrorists in the world. His policies have produced this vulnerability the United States has. His intelligence community pointed that out not me. The NIE has pointed that out and what are you talking about, is he going to fire Condi Rice? Condi Rice has talked about the need to sit down. So his first two appeasers are Rice and Gates. I hope he comes home and does something.”

On CNN, Biden just said he shouldn’t have used that word. I think he’s wrong. I think it’s high time Democrats call it like they see it on this administration.

I try to avoid “bad language” myself, but sometimes the situation calls for it. Sometimes it’s exactly the right word.

Tell it like it is, Joe.

Update: from Daily Kos:

Obama doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) do all the pushback. That’s what surrogates are for… and Bush just did his Great Uniter bit to help unite everyone in the Democratic party behind Obama.

I’ve been wrong. Bush is good for something.

Tom Tomorrow predicts the future.

February, 2009: Facing investigations into dozens of scandals, former president George W. Bush turns state’s evidence. He enters the federal witness protection program and is assigned a new identity as manager of a big-box home improvement store…

… and with Dubya’s executive experience, it’s all downhill from there.

(In an older cartoon, Mr. Tomorrow looks at the real cost of the War in Iraq. It’s not very funny.)

Via Eschaton, here, in pictures, is one view of the Bush Legacy.

It should be noted that Bush is still in office. I’m sure there’s lots more legacy to come.

Josh Marshall says Obama doesn’t really have a problem with “hard-working people” — you know, white people. But he does have a problem in Appalachia:

There’s been a lot of talk in this campaign about Barack Obama’s problem with working class white voters or rural voters. But these claims are both inaccurate because they are incomplete. You can look at states like Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states and see the different numbers and they are all explained by one basic fact. Obama’s problem isn’t with white working class voters or rural voters. It’s Appalachia. That explains why Obama had a difficult time in Ohio and Pennsylvania and why he’s getting crushed in West Virginia and Kentucky.

If it were just a matter of rural voters or the white working class, the pattern would show up in other regions. But by and large it does not.

In so many words, Pennsylvania and Ohio have big chunks of Appalachia within their borders. But those regions are heavily offset by non-Appalachian sections that are cultural and demographically distinct. West Virginia is 100% Appalachian. If you look at southeastern Ohio or the middle chunk of Pennsylvania, Obama did about the same as he’s doing tonight in West Virginia.

Josh includes maps of Appalachia and of areas where Hillary Clinton has done especially well, and the fit is pretty impressive.

Each of these regions was fiercely anti-Slavery. And most ended up raising regiments that fought in the Union Army. But they were as anti-slave as they were anti-slavery, both of which they viewed as the lynchpins of the aristocratic and inegalitarian society they loathed. It was a society that was both more violent and more self-reliant.

This is history. But it shapes the region.

The region is overwhelmingly populated by the same demographic groups who have been Clinton’s strongest supporters, and Josh writes “it’s really no surprise that Barack Obama would have a very hard time running in this region.”

That may be true, but Appalachia would be a mighty big swath of voters to write off in November. How do we win them over?

Bad news for Republicans Tuesday night from away down south in Mississippi’s first Congressional district:

Democrats scored a remarkable upset victory on Tuesday in a special Congressional election in this conservative Southern district, sending a clear signal of national problems ahead for Republicans in the fall.

The Democrat, Travis Childers, a local courthouse official, pulled together a coalition of blacks, who turned out heavily, and old-line “yellow dog” Democrats, to beat his Republican opponent, Greg Davis, the mayor of Southaven, a Memphis suburb. With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, the vote was 54 percent for Mr. Childers to 46 percent for Mr. Davis.

The seat had been in Republican hands since 1995, and the district, largely rural and stretching across the northern top of Mississippi, had been considered one of the safest in the country for President Bush’s party, as he won here with 62 percent of the vote in 2004.

Having lost a similar Congressional race this month in Louisiana, Republicans had worked desperately to win this contest, sending Vice President Dick Cheney to campaign for Mr. Davis, along with Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas; President Bush and Senator John McCain recorded telephone messages that were sent to voters throughout the district.

Josh Marshall offers some perspective:

[T]he Republicans have lost three straight Republican districts to the Democrats in by-elections this year. Hastert’s district in Illinois, Louisiana 6th, and now Mississippi 1st. Each successively more Republican than the last. In Mississippi 1st, President Bush got 62% of the vote there in 2004.

Symbolic Number Update: On the symbolic level, this pulls the House GOP caucus down to 199 — below 200.

And here’s how the Republicans will spin it: the Democrats’ hopes for big gains in November are fading fast! That’s one more seat they can’t hope to gain in November!

Today, for the first time, I saw $4 gasoline here in Columbus, Ohio.

Apparently that’s nothin’:

As oil prices soared to record levels in recent years, basic economics suggested that consumption would fall and supplies would rise as producers drilled for more oil.

But as prices flirt with $120 a barrel, many energy experts are becoming worried that neither seems to be happening. Higher prices have done little to suppress global demand or attract new production, and the resulting mismatch has sent oil prices ever higher.

… Experts expect prices above $4 a gallon this summer, and one analyst recently predicted that gasoline could reach $7 in the next four years.

Marty Jerome at wired.com says:

This ain’t a bubble, folks. Better get used to it.

To most of us, this may seem like bad news. But I think the Republican Party may promote the silver lining.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling brings us Nate, a typical neo-conservative. (Click the link or the cartoon to see the whole thing.)

You really don’t want one of these guys moving into your neighborhood.

Here’s another Nate cartoon, showing how Nate became a high-powered newspaper columnist. Nate’s never, ever right. But that must mean he’s due, right?

Update: And here’s another Nate cartoon. And another.

Via A Blog Around the Clock, the Anchorage Daily News reports on a polar bear study proposed by the Alaska legislature:

The state Legislature is looking to hire a few good polar bear scientists. The conclusions have already been agreed upon — researchers just have to fill in the science part.

Start at the end, keep going until you reach the beginning, then stop.

You know, you could save money and frustration if you dropped the “good scientists” part.

A $2 million program funded with little debate by the Legislature last month calls for using state money to fund an “academic based” conference that highlights contrarian scientific research on global warming. Legislators hope to undermine the public perception of a widespread consensus among polar bear researchers that warming global temperatures and melting Arctic ice threaten the polar bears’ survival.

Republican legislative leaders say a federal decision to declare the polar bears “threatened” by climate change would have troubling effects on Arctic oil development and the state’s economic future.

…

The $2 million is also to be used for a national public relations campaign to promote the findings of the conference.

And you could save money by just skipping over the “conference” part. A good PR firm can print up some nice brochures for a lot less than $2 million.

But the point is not to seek some non-biased measure of scientific truth. The point, said [House Speaker John] Harris, is to provide a forum for scientists whose views back Alaska’s interests.

“You know as well as I do that scientists are like lawyers,” Harris said.

Methinks Mr. Harris got through his science classes in school by getting a copy of the Teacher’s Edition of the textbook and looking up the answers in the back. He seems to believe that’s the scientific method.

Mark Vonnegut wrote the introduction to Armageddon in Retrospect, a posthumous collection of short pieces by his father, Kurt Vonnegut. One of the things Mark says is this:

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

The introduction is all I’ve read so far, so excuse me — gonna engage in some subversion. Gonna change the world a little bit.