Who McCain was, and who he has become

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Finally, it seems, the media is noticing the profound and craven about-face McCain has undertaken in his dogged pursuit of higher office:

From the latter:

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains — his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that’s all — but just as honorably. No more, though.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician’s lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

Wild, Wacky Stuff

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Over the weekend, the most interesting SEC contest had to be Auburn and Mississippi State. Despite 300+ yards vs. State’s 116, the final score was a bizarre and nearly unprecedented 3 to 2, with Auburn on top thanks to a second quarter field goal.

Dept. of Weddings

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George Takei and Brad Altman, his partner of 21 years, married over the weekend in California:

Walter Koenig, who played navigator Pavel Chekov in the original Star Trek cast, and Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed communications officer Lieutenant Uhura, served as “best man” and “best lady,” Asianweek said.

Best Star Trek wedding EVAR.

Today’s Ike Quote

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“Why are YOU sucking up all the God love?” — Joie Brun, in re: the testimony of some random Ike survivor and their conviction that “God’s taking care of us.”

Ranking Wanking

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The new polls are out, and (no surprise) have USC in the top spot again — but Georgia has dropped to 3, behind Oklahoma, of all people. I find it impossible to even entertain the thought that OU could beat UG, but whatever; we’ll see how it shakes out later in the season. USC, as we pointed out, made clear Ohio State remains a joke playing in a joke conference — but the SEC has beaten the Buckeyes as soundly as USC just did in two championship games in a row. Further, USC is a game behind Georgia in play. If all three teams continue to win, and the powers that be put Okahoma into the title game, we’ll be among those calling bullshit.

Actual rankings here; we are amused and pleased that fully half the AP top ten are SEC squads (#3 Georgia, #4 Florida, #6 LSU, #9 Alabama (!), #10 Auburn). No, I’m not entirely convinced Alabama should be that high, but it’s nice people have confidence.

Alabama Shows Up

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The Tide rolled Western Kentucky, 41 to 7. After an embarrassing game against Tulane last week, Saban’s boys managed to remember how to play the game yesterday, even well enough to get some bench playing time. In fact, Saban’s gripe about yesterday says volumes:

With a chance to get a look at young players and subs, Saban did find some fault in the offense’s performance.

“I wish we wouldn’t have kept the ball so long, because there were some defensive players we wanted to see a little more,” he said. “But it didn’t work out that way.”

Oh, also, a tiny bit of vindication: the Tulane squad Saban had so much trouble with last week very nearly stole a game from East Carolina yesterday — EC only pulled it out late in the 4th quarter. Maybe those smart fellers are actually playing football this year after all. They’re still 0-2, but it’s two very solid games they lost.

Welcome to Camp Ike

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Houston, as you may have heard, has recently had some Weather.

Heathen Central escaped fairly unscathed from an existential point of view, but with some fairly basic spiritual failures: namely, the unimpeded flow of electrons into the household has been, well, impeded. Further, attempts at the usage of electrons to communicate with the outside world, in any media whatsoever, fails utterly. Additionally, the lack of incoming electrons has prevented the communication with the satellite entertainment overlords, which completes a sort of trifecta of failure, and there we are.

In the face of these problems, we’ve decamped to Camp Ike, in the bizarre Heights area of Houston. Wild and untamed, the Heights are chockablock with Cottage Folk, Neovictorians, and snooty yuppies, but also turns out to be the home of longtime Heathen associates Joie Brun and Karl Ludwig, whose union is in some small way the fault of Heathen Central. (It’s a long story we will no doubt someday relate to their charming pair of tykes.) Somehow, these fine folk have managed to find themselves among the tiny, tiny minority of Houstonians (sub 5%) for whom the free flow of electrons remains unimpeded. They, too, are unable to communicate with the satellite overlords, but the presence of incoming electrons means the conversion of heat to cold continues unabated, and the Intarwub remains accessible.

Consequently, not only have Mrs Heathen and I packed our bags for bizarre Heights environs, but also the Ear o’Corn clan, Rhymes-with-Schloachim, and the dynamic duo of Ultilopp and Mama Nia. Joined in our adventures by Papa Brun — on loan from his usual clan in Florida — we will empty freezers, make cocktails, play Rockband, and fight crime from this ersatz Hall of Justice until further notice.

It might be fun to build a table of length-of-acquaintance for this little party, but it’s complex and wacky and I’m not gonna do it right now. I will note that multiple of these relationships date back to 1989 at least, and Ear O’Corn and I have been co-conspirators since 1986. Ultilopp and Mama Nia are relative newcomers, but they fit in like custom parts. Camp Ike may not be ideal, but goddamn I’m sure it’s gonna be fun, and it’s hard to conceive of a group of folks I’d rather be inconvenienced with (or that we’d rather inconvenience).

And all hail Joie and Karl for their generosity. Photo documentation is, we suspect, inevitable.

Inshallah.

Ike Report

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We’re fine. No damage, but no power either. We’re at a friend’s house; they are, unaccountably, among the 4% of Houston who still have power.

Michelle’s got a movie you should watch

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From my friend (and Mobile native) Michelle Richmond’s blog, in a post about a documentary film making the rounds called The Order of Myths, about (the original) Mardis Gras in Mobile:

In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s classic novel about searching and longing in Louisiana, Binx Bolling, himself a less-than-enthusiastic participant in the better-known Mardi Gras of New Orleans, says that to see one’s own city on the big screen is, in a way, to have one’s own place and time validated, made real. I’m a long way from Alabama. It’s fair to say that, for a long time, I have not considered it home. In one of the stories in my first book, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, the narrator, Gracie, who has also left Mobile, remarks on how ill-at-ease she feels every time she returns there: “Some Mobilians don’t know that the party has long-since ended, clinging hard-heartedly to the notion that the Confederates won the war.” I was 25 years old when I wrote that, close enough to home to despise it, too young to understand the subtler nuances that Brown captures in The Order of Myths. This is a film for Southerners who’ve left home, and for those who have stayed, and for anyone who wants to reach a deeper understanding of a place and a culture that has been by turns mocked and mythologized for decades.

There’s a trailer.

No surprise here

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A year after taking their ball(s) and going home, NBC Universal programming is once again available in iTunes. Turns out they need Apple more than Apple needs them. No surprise there; making it hard for your customers to see your programs they way they want to see them is never a good plan; NBC’s bullheadedness here certainly sent Heathen to the Torrents to catch up on Battlestar last year, after they foolishly pulled the show from iTunes without having DVDs in the channel.

Yuck.

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Jesus Fuck, Nicky, what the hell was that? You beat the everliving tar out of #9 Clemson, and then look like a goddamn AA squad against a non-conference private school like Tulane that’s presumably hampered by actual admissions requirements? You go three entire quarters against their D without an offensive TD? Sure, the punt return team bagged two in the first half, but special teams points shouldn’t be the backbone of your offense, dude. ESPN used words like “listless” to describe the Tide on Saturday, and that’s being KIND. 172 total yards (to Tulane’s 318), four allowed sacks, and two — TWO! — missed field goals will NOT make the faithful happy about your gold-plated contract, Nicky.

Good Christ. A win is a win, but the Alabama-Tulane game was a fucking embarrassment in every other way that mattered. I’m frankly shocked the Tide didn’t drop in the rankings this week, instead of rising (2 spots, to 11 — HA! — in AP; only one notch in USAT, to 16). Good thing Saban’s got another non-con next Saturday before the big Georgia game. Some folks need some ass whippin’ at practice these two weeks.

Speaking of which: Georgia’s still only number 2, behind perennially-fellated USC despite the fact that the Trojans were OFF this week while Georgia played. At least the pollsters are split; Georgia got 23 first place votes to USC’s 33 in the AP poll. Ohio State drifts south this week on the “strength” of their weak win over Ohio, and in the final shakeup it turns out the AP and USAT agree on the top ten: USC, UGa, Oklahoma, UF, OSU, Missouri (ha!), LSU, Texas, Auburn, and Wisconsin.

Oh, and the fucking Irish won their opener. Ick.

Our Hero This Week

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Carl Malamud. Who is he? He’s the guy who is, essentially, daring states to try to assert copyright over their laws.

Yeah, read that again. Some states are actually claiming that their laws are copyrighted, and that reproducing them without permission — and without paying the state! — is a violation of copyright law. Obviously, this is a terrible idea — the states should instead be making it as easy as possible for citizens to read the laws that govern them. So Mr Malamud is publishing them online via scanned copies for any and all to read, download, print, etc., for free.

And he’s hoping very much that his home state sues.

The Party of Hate

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Check out what Doug Rushkoff has to say about the RNC’s week-long Two Minutes Hate, and about Giuliani’s speech in particular.

Last night, the Republican Convention made it clear they prefer war. They see the world as a dangerous and terrible place. Like the fascist leaders satirized in Starship Troopers, they say they believe it is better to be on the offensive, taking the war to the people who might wish us harm than playing defense. It is better to be an international aggressor – a bulldog with lipstick – than led by the misguided notion that attacking people itself makes the world a more dangerous place.

And more:

Republican party representatives are proud today that their convention has finally produced the “same level of energy and enthusiasm” as the DNC’s last week. And while it may have produced the same level of excitement, the excitement was of a very different character. It’s much easier to get people riled up but inviting them to hate a man – particularly one who they haven’t been allowed to hate for traditional reasons. Giuliani’s job – much like his job as mayor of NYC – was to give the Republicans in attendance permission to hate Obama and the potentially intelligent society he represents. It’s not about city vs. country or educated vs. military. It’s about thought vs. violence.

Where the DNC’s show talked about policy, and about what we can accomplish together — which is what “government” is supposed to be in a Democracy — the GOP took another path.

Dept. of Bollocks

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We reckon the pollsters are just tired of the ongoing SEC dominance, and as a consequence voted their wishes instead of their consciences this week: After a pair of blowout wins, somehow USC is magically ranked at 1, ahead of Georgia. In the preseason poll, the perennially-overrated Trojans were stuck at #3 (AP, behind Georgia and Ohio State, who also has no business that high) or #2 (ESPN, just behind UGa).

Actually, we’re being a little sarcastic; both Georgia and Ohio State played creampuff non-BCS teams, while USC played a BCS creampuff (ACC’s Virginia, who we suppose does have a football team — but a 52-7 win, how “quality” can they be?). So we guess there’s at least some logic. What DEFIES logic is that some of the pollsters are still voting for Ohio State as number one. WTF, people? Anyway, Georgia will likely move up as their “real” schedule picks up and they play more quality opponents (including a 4-week run of Spurrier’s Gamecocks followed by 3 ranked teams starting on 9/13). Their slate is as tough as anybody’s, given that they have to play in the SEC.

In other news, Alabama jumps mightily on the strength of the Clemson win: USAToday has them at 17 and the AP at 13. Clemson drops off the AP, and clings to 22 on the USAT. (Clemson and Illinois are the only 0-1 squads on the rankings.)

Look for NickyLou to bag the next two easily, hopefully: he meets Tulane and Western Kentucky in the next two weeks before opening the conference schedule against Arkansas a week after that. With a little look and more SabanSauce, the Tide could be 4-0 going into the Georgia game on the 27th. Kentucky and Mississippi follow with what ought to be gimmes before Tennessee (usually anybody’s game, but the Tide is waxing while Fulmer’s Vols wane), another should-be-easy with Arkansas State, and then the big LSU game on 11/8, more than 2 months away.

Bruce Nails TSA — AGAIN

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In an LA Times op-ed, security expert Bruce Schneier rips the TSA a new one over the ID rules:

[T]he photo ID requirement is a joke. Anyone on the no-fly list can easily fly whenever he wants. Even worse, the whole concept of matching passenger names against a list of bad guys has negligible security value.

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person’s name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

[…]

This vulnerability isn’t new. It isn’t even subtle. I first wrote about it in 2006. I asked Kip Hawley, who runs the TSA, about it in 2007. Today, any terrorist smart enough to Google “print your own boarding pass” can bypass the no-fly list.

This gaping security hole would bother me more if the very idea of a no-fly list weren’t so ineffective. The system is based on the faulty notion that the feds have this master list of terrorists, and all we have to do is keep the people on the list off the planes.

That’s just not true. The no-fly list — a list of people so dangerous they are not allowed to fly yet so innocent we can’t arrest them — and the less dangerous “watch list” contain a combined 1 million names representing the identities and aliases of an estimated 400,000 people. There aren’t that many terrorists out there; if there were, we would be feeling their effects.

Almost all of the people stopped by the no-fly list are false positives.

[…]

In the end, the photo ID requirement is based on the myth that we can somehow correlate identity with intent. We can’t. And instead of wasting money trying, we would be far safer as a nation if we invested in intelligence, investigation and emergency response — security measures that aren’t based on a guess about a terrorist target or tactic.

That’s the TSA: Not doing the right things. Not even doing right the things it does.

Needless to say, the TSA has no intelligent answer to any of this. Their usual angle is “trust us; we know what we’re doing.” Frankly, we’ve never seen any evidence that’s true.

Twitter Treasure

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A triptych of beauty from Merlin Mann:

Howlin’ Wolf sounds like everything that scared America in the 50s, except Russians, jews, and vaginas.

I’d enjoy a cable series where fictionalized Howlin’ Wolf, Capt. Beefheart, and Tom Waits live in a van and solve crimes. Maybe w/a monkey.

Oh, also? They’d have a band. And at the end of each episode, they’d sing a really weird song about morals and staying in school. Obviously.

Police State in Minneapolis

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They’re rounding up suspected protesters in advance of the Republican convention. Near as we can recall, this isn’t actually illegal.

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than “fire code violations,” and early this morning, the Sheriff’s department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

This is obscene. Some heads need to roll over this.

Clemson Who?

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The Tide put a full-sized SEC hurtin’ on #9 Clemson tonight, to the tune of 34 to 10, and it wasn’t even that close; the Tide held the ball for over 41 minutes, and outproduced the Tigers 419 to 188 yards (all in the air; Clemson had 1 rushing yard). The Tide blew two early scoring opps, settling for field goals when John Parker Wilson couldn’t connect even without meaningful Clemson resistance in his first two possessions. Quoth Bowden the Younger, “they outplayed us on both sides of the ball.” Clemson was completely unprepared for SEC speed and toughness.

To be fair, though, Clemson is just Clemson. They lost to Maryland and BC last year, for crying out loud. This #9-ranking is preseason bullshit, even if knocking them off it does fuel Tide passions. The Alabama faithful should remember that Clemson hasn’t beaten UA in 12 straight meetings, even if the last one was a 56-0 shellacking back when Bear ran the show (1975). Alabama gets a couple easy weeks before the next “real” game — next are unranked Tulane and Western Kentucky, followed by freshly Nuttless Arkansas on 9/20 before a big show in Athens against currently #1 Georgia. Let’s hope Nicky Lou can keep it together, and keep this win from going to his young team’s head.

More to come. Inshallah.

Buchanan on Obama

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This is really amazing. Buchanan — somewhere to the right of Mussolini, typically — is over the friggin MOON about Obama’s speech; quoth Keith Olberman: “We had to stop PB gushing over Obama’s speech for the sake of time. Perhaps that will tell you the story better than anything else we can say.” Word.

Direct link.

Again with Barack

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We sort of wondered if this clearly very gifted speaker could top his race speech, or his stage-setting winner from the 2004 convention. That was misplaced worry; even Pat Buchanan seems to think Obama’s was the best convention speech ever, and GOP street-fighter Alex Castellanos’ reaction ends with “whoever didn’t get picked for Republican VP today may be a lucky Republican.”

Your lips to God’s ears, Alex.