Mostly meh. The town hall format is kinda dumb because most of the questions are of the “What have you done for me lately?” variety and are followed by shameless pandering.
The foreign policy stuff was more interesting, and I think McCain came off a bit more sensibly there, but the “I’m gonna get bin Laden, and I know how” sidestep was a big time waster.
Make sure to read both Stephen Green’s drunkblogging, and the Democracy in America liveblog.
by this statement that funding alternative energy now will stop Iran from attacking Israel by diminishing its oil revenues? Are you kidding me with this?
the “green behind the ears” mixed metaphor. -10 because it came from Senator Glib.
is getting tired.
Clean coal? Oh, come on. Oxymoron of the decade.
“We’ve got to do something about home values.” And protect retirees. And buy a bunch of mortgages back. And other stuff. And this is why I hate town hall debates — they always turn into a spending spree.
his acceptance speech at the DNC tonight, and I am having a hard time concentrating on the speech because the NBC on-screen graphics are so damn ugly. Pink and purple? Gold and silver? What is this? Glitter Barbie Does Denver?
And that blue? That awful typography? This looks like a broadcast from 1988, not 2008.
About the speech. Obama is hitting all the Democratic talking points: Bush sucks, McCain doesn’t get it, no more outsourcing, renewable energy, energy independence, affordable education, affordable housing, affordable, accessible health care, and all this with tax cuts, too. Magic!
As always, he’s a great, great speaker.
Stephen Green is a little bit angry with Governor Bobby Jindal (who majored in biology in college) and his support of the LSEA, the new Louisina bill allowing, in so many words, intelligent design to be taught in public school science classes:
Social sciences are, almost by definition, soft-skulled bullshit. So let the liberals teach it. Real science is supposed to mean something… and when it no longer does, then we’re all screwed.
So am I emotional on this issue? You bet your ass I am. And I’ll get emotional whether it’s a Kansas school board, or the legislature and governor of a state I’ve barely even visited.
In the churches, faith can and does sustain good people of every stripe — and in ways biology, physics, and math never could. But forcing our preachers to teach in the scientific method would ruin the religious experience. Just as surely, mixing faith and science would destroy those things science offers us.
And with that, I’ll step away from the pulpit for a while. I’d like to think that Governor Jindal would do likewise and get the hell out of our classrooms.
Read the whole thing, especially Green’s engagement with soft-skulled ignoramus hpb in the comments.
Now, the foundations of human knowledge, and science, are by no means sure things, and are open to reasoned, intelligent criticism†. If you are going to teach criticism of modern scientific theories, as the bill states, you’d be much better off teaching applied epistemology* than what the bill’s writers intend (hat tip).
Matters of faith have no place in our science classrooms.
† And yeah, intelligent design ain’t it.
* Ha, make sure to read their terms of service.
The main worry about Mr Webb, however, is that he is a genuine fire-breathing economic populist. He appears actually to believe the sort of stuff that Mr Obama only says during Democratic primaries. Since vice-presidents sometimes become presidents, this matters. American workers, says Mr Webb, “are at the mercy of cut-throat executives who are vastly overpaid, partly as a consequence of giving [the workers'] jobs away to other people.” Illegal immigration and globalisation “threaten to dissipate” the American middle-class way of life. He predicts that, unless the government acts to restore “economic fairness”, America “may well go the way of ancient Greece [or] greed-ridden Rome”.
America may be horribly unequal, but it is not, as Mr Webb imagines, apocalyptically so. And judging by his book, Mr Webb has only a shaky understanding of the economic system he decries. He thinks South Korea is more productive than America, and that “most” investors are among the wealthiest 1% of Americans. (In fact, about half of Americans own shares.) He is worryingly hazy about how he would make America fairer. But his instincts are plainly hostile to the free flow of goods, investment and people across borders. Mr Obama, who has recently started to sound less protectionist on the campaign trail and has appointed a team of impeccably centrist economic advisers, can surely do a bit better.
For appeal amongst blue-collar whites, I’d probably go with the oilier Al Gore or John Edwards, the latter of whom also has some markedly protectionist tendencies, but could conceivably be convinced otherwise, or at least more easily than Mr. Webb. (Via Democracy in America)
drunkblogging today’s Pennsylvania primary election over at PajamasMedia.