Reason Magazine - Staff > Tim Cavanaugh > Hit & Run Posts

Out of Towns

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:05:00 EDT

We're straight outta St. Paul today, and if nothing else, both our host cities have turned out to be wonderful places that deserve special mention (and according to the packaging materials, are both celebrating 150th birthdays this year). Denver has a deservedly high reputation already, but since I've always been a fan of the Twin Cities and they (it?) often come in for a lot of unkind mockery (Cold! Somalis! Dumbbell accents!), I want to note that the greater metro area here offers a unique value proposition: blue state living at red state prices. Just lose the 8 o'clock liquor store closing times and it'll be perfect. Thanks for reading our convention coverage.

I'm Overwhel--; No, I'm Underwhel--; O.K., I'm Whelmed

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:14:00 EDT

A fitting anticlimax for a pretty low-energy week, I think. McCain's speech was good, very gracious, moving in parts, and generally serviceable. The roof was blown off the dump last night, I guess. Maybe this was good enough. Hey! Balloons!

Also I think McCain may have been hamstrung by the lineup of wet blankets who warmed up for him. Tom Ridge wasn't even hitting his applause lines. Why didn't they let Rudy go tonight, since it was all security stuff anyway?

Foreign Aid Oil Money Crowd Pleaser

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:04:00 EDT

I may have missed one, but inside the Xcel Center it seemed to me the biggest applause moment of the night (other than the bum's rush for the Code Pinkies) came when McCain refused to give billions to "countries that don't like us very much."

~~I'm in agreement, but who knew this one was at the forefront of everybody's mind?~~ *

* Thanks to Joe for disambiguating me. I was wondering how the foreign aid budget got into that mix, but like McCain I was having a hard time staying awake through the speech.

No-Major-Legislation Watch

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:15:00 EDT

Back when John Kerry was getting raked over the coals for, among other things, not having authored enough major legislation, I put out the sophistic argument that this should actually be a point in his favor: If there's one thing America doesn't need, it's any more laws.

The argument was sophistic because Kerry's record overall demonstrated that his lack of monogrammed his-and-hers legislation stemmed from something other than a Ron Pauline commitment to small government.

In Obama's case, the argument is probably just as sophistic, but at least his newness to his position leaves open the possible interpretation that he's guided by a welcome legislative caution. (At least the ethics reform he worked on in Illinois ended up focusing on disclosure and reining in elected officials, rather than contribution limits aimed at individuals.)

OK, I don't really think there's anything to this argument. But you're going to hear a lot more tonight about how Obama hasn't written any new laws in Illinois or Washington because he's always had his eye on the White House. I just wish Obama would fire back by saying: "Yeah, I didn't pass any new laws, you can thank me later. And come on, who cares that I didn't spend a lot of energy on a bunch of Mickey Mouse lawmaking in Illinois when I can move on to something more interesting?"

They Don't Call Him Honest Iago for Nothing

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:09:00 EDT

While tooling around the outskirts of St. Paul this morning, I saw an "Iago for Mayor" sign. Another dadaist prank? An evil parrot? An evil Venetian courtier? None of the above. It's Ed Iago, running for the executive spot in West St. Paul. And while it seems like a good name for a one of those politicians who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty, keep yet their hearts attending on themselves, people speak very highly of Ed, and I've had such a nice time in the Twin Cities that I'll wish him the best.

All Is Change, Or Maybe All Is Reform

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:12:00 EDT

One theme people have been hitting a lot this week is an attack on the Obamariffic use of the word "change." Most succinctly, one delegate last night said to me: "Not all change is good. People don't want change, they want reform. That's the message we've been sending."

Not too well, as it turns out. The tale of the tape from last night's big speeches:

Mike Huckabee: 7 changes, no reforms

Rudy Giuliani: 4 changes, 2 reforms

Mitt Romney: 2 changes, 1 pornography-free school, 1 Chinese Adam Smith on steroids, no reforms.

Sarah Palin (on message): 2 changes, 7 reforms.

Many of the references to change above were sarcastic or quibbling on Obama's usage. But as Matt Welch noted earlier, reform comes loaded with a bunch of stuff McCain would rather not talk about. Campaign finance reform? A flaming sack. Immigration reform? Don't even say it! Ethics reform? Out where the woodbine twineth.

There are other associations as well. They didn't send bad kids to change school in the old days, the sent them to reform school. And I'd rather hang out with a changed alcoholic than a reformed alcoholic.

Girls, Business Folx, and People of Color

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:28:00 EDT

It's Palin night at the Xcel Center, and so far everybody at the podium has been a woman, a member of a minority group, an entrepreneur, or all three.

And to tell you the truth, I have no problem with this. This in fact is what I've been looking for from the Republicans: an unabashed assertion that the free market is not a plot against the disenfranchised; it's the best friend the disenfranchised have.

Of course the flip side of this truth is that the free market has no more ardent enemy than a successful businessman. And no politician, Repubican or Democrat, will ever admit that.

Music Alert

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:21:00 EDT

Fair warning: I was in the Xcel center earlier today while John Rich did his soundcheck for "We're all raisin' McCain." And I gotta tell ya, if you have any way to deafen yourself permanently before the live show starts, do it now!

Bristol Palin and the Underestimating of Social Cons

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:44:00 EDT

Some hack needs to coin the phrase "Juno Vote," and it might as well be me. Kibbitzing about the Bristol Palin story yesterday with a delegate (a lady!), I got another whiff of 2007's surprise hit for social conservatives. "Of course I don't approve of the behavior," this delegate said, "but I think they're making the right choice, and this humanizes her."

I don't feel one way or another about the behavior or the choice, and I'm even not a big fan of humans, but it reminds me of why on the topic of good ol' American humpin', I sometimes feel more sympathy for social conservatives than for people I agree with politically. I don't subscribe to the idea of trying to rein in all sorts of private erotic behavior, but I can respect their view of sexual desire as something destabilizing, crazy-making, unpredictable, and fundamentally threatening to plenty of social norms. That, in my view, is an argument for free love and wild sex, not against. But at least the social cons have a sense that eros is more than just another boring political issue or side in the culture war. (Not to mention that I'm unsure being reluctant to have some public school time-server teach your kids how to screw in a sex-ed class marks you as a knuckle-dragging naif.) As his comments the other day indicate, Dan Savage is one of the few people who can hold both a politically mature view of sexual freedom and a realistic idea of how wacky and uncontrollable sexual desire is (and I'm not just saying that because Dan Savage is fine).

Put another way: It's inevitable that everybody's first response to the knocked-up story focuses on political calculus, given that the grandmother-to-be is trying to become the vice president. But if your first reaction to hearing about this is to say "This is the result of abstinence-only education," and you actually believe that, your view of sex is as goofy and clueless as that of any bible thumper who worries that electing the wrong president will cause men to leave the natural uses of women and burn in their lust one after another.

Palin Speech Entrance Song: Open Thread

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:15:00 EDT

Name your song picks in the comments.

Sorry, "Papa Don't Preach" is already taken. (I haven't googled, but I presume I'm the one-millionth mug to use that gag. Do I win something?)

GOP Platform: Immigration Hot and Cold

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:03:00 EDT

The Republican Party platform (PDF) uses Latin to show the importance of English:

One sign of our unity is our English language. For newcomers, it has always been the fastest route to prosperity in America. English empowers. We support English as the official language in our nation, while welcoming the ethnic diversity in the United States and the territories, including language. Immigrants should be encouraged to learn English. English is the accepted language of business, commerce, and legal proceedings, and it is essential as a unifying cultural force. It is also important, as part of cultural integration, that our schools provide better education in U.S. history and civics for all children, thereby fostering a commitment to our national motto, E Pluribus Unum.

It's probably a sign that John McCain, as he likes to say, has "heard the American people on this issue" that immigration is grouped under the National Security rubric in the platform. The section is loaded with enforcement-only stuff, but not unduly so: no driver's licenses, no public benefits, punishment for sanctuary cities, harder penalties for people-smuggling, and "correcting court decisions that have made deportation so difficult." There's a paragraph on workplace enforcement that, as Mike Flynn noted, calls for reauthorization of E-Verify.

There's some sunnier stuff as well, on "embracing immigrant communities." And one sign that Republicans are mindful of the cockamamie legal immigration bureaucracy, or at least reading about it in reason: "It is a national disgrace that the first experience most new Americans have is with a dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy defined by delay and confusion; we will no longer tolerate those failures."

No luck, though, if your home country happens to be one where they execute people with unusual sexual alignments: "We oppose, however, the granting of refugee status on the basis of lifestyle or other non-political factors."

Sound of Pins Dropping In St. Paul

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:20:00 EDT

Things are looking a little more active today, but boy, yesterday was as quiet as whatever church the churchmouse lives in. How quiet was it? A couple of guys tied on tefillin and started chanting on the concourse at the Xcel Center, and that was about the most exciting thing going on:

Also so quiet that Matt Welch and I headed to a bar called The Liffey, right outside the convention center, and it was almost empty. Fortunately, one of the handful of other patrons was Dan Savage, Seattle Stranger sex columnist and for my money one of the greatest living Americans. Savage is murdering the convention at the Stranger's RNC blog, and I can understand his glee at Sarah Palin's ongoing pecadilloes, but isn't it all good when you get these life/sex stories, because they show how actual human behavior doesn't track to any political dynamic? "Yeah," said Savage, "because all the dynamics of sex are older than the morality and political rules. The rules of sexual attraction go back millions of years, a lot longer than people have been making political parties."

So if things don't heat up today, I'm forming a new political organization: The Sex Party.

Party Platform: If You Can't Read It In One Trip To the John, That's a Problem

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:42:00 EDT

The Republican Party Platform (PDF) is approved, and we're going through looking for choice bits, but before we get to that, how about a note on brevity:

• Republican platform, not counting signatures: 24,620 words.

• Democratic platform (PDF), not counting appendices: 18,916 words.

• United States Constitution, counting amendments and a few extra words thrown in for navigation and content: 8,089 words.

The Libertarian Party does pretty well by this measure, coming in at a crisp 2,435 words. But maybe there's some sloganeering value in dispensing with it entirely, so you can just say "The U.S. Constitution is our platform."

An American Carol: One Thumb Up

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:47:00 EDT

Dave Weigel and I were among the not-so-happy not-so-few who got to attend a Minneapolis screening of David Zucker's An American Carol last night. For the other half of our Siskel and Ebert routine, Dave (who had a bad feeling about the picture ahead of time) will be giving a thumbs-down review later. While I wasn't completely taken with An American Carol, I thought some of it was fairly good, so here's my case for it.

As with Annie, all the hits are front-loaded. Even in a screening with the most receptive possible audience, the room grew ominously quiet during the second half, partly because in its later moments the film turns didactic, gloomy and, for what bills itself as a goofball comedy, surprisingly hard to follow. Whether that works for you will depend on your tolerance for weird Brechtian tonal shifts. I found the unevenness pretty interesting, though I too got a sinking, oh-no-now-the-plot-is-starting feeling when the ghostly-visitor business started well into the second reel: not least because I think the government should have outlawed Christmas Carol knockoffs decades ago. The only part that sent me into a blind range was the notorious ACLU-zombie sequence, in which you can apparently kill the ghouls by shooting them center of mass, not by destroying the head or removing the brain. When you violate living dead laws that flagrantly, you're obviously not even trying.

The gleeful, playing-to-the-choir travesties of leftists yielded many fine moments, though Zucker really were determined never to let the joke speak for itself without a lot of explanation of why the joke has a deeper point. There was a great bit where the guy who played Hercules gets an award for making courageous films denouncing McCarthyism, the Holocaust, and so on, but characteristically it gets buried when Herc goes on about how he would never make a movie about a current threat like Islamic terrorism. I realize Zucker has made a fortune underestimating the intelligence of the audience, but it seems like he used to have more fun while doing it.

What is interesting about the Scrooge plot is that it hinges on belief in salvation and the possibility of redeeming the wicked. So after much churning of machinery, the Michael Moore character played (very well) by Kevin Farley (our era's Jim Belushi) gets to turn around and become a true American patriot. And that may be what makes the picture interesting. My understanding is that Zucker himself is a lefty turned post-9/11 hawk, so Farley's desperate mugging throughout much of the picture can be read as an autobiographical touch from the filmmaker. The whole movie has the herniated, clapping-off-the-beat quality of somebody trying to fit in with a new crowd he's still not totally comfortable with -- in this case, the kind of Americans who actually have family members in the service. David Zucker may not be a person anybody ever wanted to see a personal film from, but in the event it makes the material more interesting than it might have been. The joke about how Farley hates country music gives another dimension to the final, rousing for-the-troops fest led by Trace Adkins. I'd guess there still aren't many Adkins fans in Zucker's zip code.

Finally, while the laffs eventually peter out, there are some pretty great ones early on. Since those have been widely described, I'll just add a funny airport-security bit purporting to be a documentary against "Christian terrorists" by a Rosie O'Donnell type. Oh, and there's also a running gag about how nobody likes documentaries, to which I'm particularly sympathetic.

Gen X Veep Nominee In One-Family Baby Boom

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:22:00 EDT

Sarah Palin baby mama brouhaha nukes the fridge within 24 hours, as comely 17-year-old daughter Bristol announces that she is pregnant and will marry the father.

Not sure this disposes of the rumors, but it does suggest the abundant fresh air and outdoorsy living in the Last Frontier are conducive to fertility. May also please Juno fans, social cons, Democrats, and glass ceiling watchers. (Still no woman president but at least we can have a woman Billy Carter.) Best wishes to the mother-to-be.

Palin Baby Mama Scuttlebutt

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:45:00 EDT

In an unguarded moment last night, McCain Report blogger Michael Goldfarb replied to my question of whether there's any truth to the rumor that Sarah Palin's Down Syndrome child is actually her daughter's with the following less-than-confidence-inspiring comment: "Well, I don't...think so." He added that the whole thing, like Hurricane Gustav, will have played out, one way or another, within the next 24 hours.

That wasn't enough for the pretty pro-McCain crowd he was talking to, and when one interlocutor (not me) accused McCain of not having properly vetted his nominee, Goldfarb dropped the M bomb. "He's a maverick," he said. "That's the way mavericks do things!"

On this point I agree with him. Every family in America has something this fucked up or more in its past. In fact, I don't see why (other than the fact that Palin used the baby story as demonstration of her pro-life bona fides) the whole thing couldn't be spun as a touching story of a mother protecting her kid. Like the straight-talking maverick persona, this family weirdness (which I am not, repeat not claiming is true or even credible) is something most Americans could readily identify with.

In fact, the dumbest comment on this matter has come from About.com urban legends guy David Emery, who writes: "Can anyone point to a single example of such a thing ever happening before -- a mother pretending to be pregnant and faking a birth to 'cover for' or 'protect the reputation of' her pregnant teen daughter?"

Just sticking with famous people I can point to one: Hillary Clinton supporter Jack Nicholson, who was raised to believe his grandmother was his mother. Among the less famous: several people in my high school.

Michael Moore and Louisiana Delegates Agree: God More Concerned About Party Politics Than Human Life

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:13:00 EDT

As you've probably heard, today is a wash for the RNC, with the schedule amended "to only conduct the official business of the convention." Even without the split infinitive, this would be a problem for the convention news, and it feels a little like a Scoop knockoff to be canvassing the delegates for reactions. Although the folks gathered in the Twin Cities may be secretly relieved that President Bush isn't showing, they kept up a good face, furrowing brows for the fate of New Orleans.

Only one person suggested the media were blowing Gustav out of proportion to jinx the GOP — which, given the apparent pooping out of the storm, seems as plausible a reading as any. All of the 15 or 20 delegates I spoke with were confident that their prayers for a less lethal storm had been answered, and one guy from Louisiana said "Absolutely" when I asked if he thought God was actually paying attention.

Interestingly, that puts them in agreement with Michael Moore, who has gotten a lot of flak recently for suggesting that God sent Gustav toward the Big Easy in order to punish the Republicans.

While the delegates tended to put a high-minded spin on the bad news ("We have to hold back because we're just all praying that the people down there will be OK," was a characteristic reaction), it's worth noting that it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to people in Louisiana if the Republicans had decided to let les bons temps rouler. Only one guy I talked to was willing to put the thing into strict horse-race terms. "Everything was going our way," he said, "then all of a sudden here comes a hurricane... It's just bad luck. Sometimes you get unlucky, and we got unlucky."

Hoping for better luck today....

I Dreamed I Saw Todd Palin Last Night, Alive as You and Me....

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 03:03:00 EDT

I've been wondering what people are making of the remarkable detail that Sarah Palin and her husband are respectively former and current union members, and that John McCain saw fit to make this a bragging point in his introduction. From McCain's introduction of Palin:

The person I'm about to introduce to you was a union member and is married to a union member and understands the problems, the hopes and the values of working people...

And from Palin's introduction of her husband (which in the delivery really sounded like the part where Pat Sajak reels off a few biographical details about a new Wheel contestant):

Todd is a production operator in the oil fields up on Alaska's North Slope. And he's a proud member of the United Steelworkers union. And he's a world-champion snow machine racer.

Because somebody's always thought of something before you have, Matt Bodie at PrafsBlawg gives it an excogitational rumination:

The real question, in my view, is whether policy will follow rhetoric. Will McCain-Palin advocate for greater restrictions on trade? Will they adopt a more restrictive position on immigration policy, or will they drift back towards McCain's more pro-immigration views? And given that Palin is a former union member, and her husband is a Steelworker, will they support the Employee Free Choice Act?

I'm not sure Palin's own views on any of these matters are that important, given how little Vice Presidents matter in the first place. Nor is this move likely to cause any friction in the storybook marriage of labor leaders and the Democrats (though rank and file union members tend to be less faithful to the party). But it's certainly notable that McCain seems to think of union membership as an advantage here. What are the angles?

Fun Palin reax from Facebook "What are you doing right now" tags

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:51:00 EDT

Status updates: They're the new blogs. I just saw these three in a row:

John Heilemann is watching john mccain grapple with buyer's remorse before having exited the checkout line.

Andrew Malcolm Reacting to Palin, Kay Bailey Hutchison gets high marks for honesty.

Hal Espen The paleoconservative blogosphere believes that Palin will get McCain to finally flip on ANWR, with a joint visit to show how "ugly" it is.

"...someone who has executive experience..."

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:24:00 EDT

Making his Palin announcement, John McCain raises an interesting weakness in his own resume: It's actually the person at the bottom of the ticket who has experience running things. When was the last time we had a Senator for Prez and a governor for Veep? Answer in the comments.

Update: Commenter Nick M gets the cigar:

The 1920 winners Senator Warren G. Harding & Governor Calvin Coolidge;
and the 1860 losers Senator Stephen A. Douglas & Former Governor Herschel Vespasian Johnson.

Nick actually pwned the challenge Friday. Sorry for the tardy update. He(?) is the fastest wiki in the west.

Change we can't all believe in

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:10:00 EDT

Bucking the trend of Obama love, Joshua Trevino calls last night's speech an "epochal" squandering of political capital, caused by the candidate's "ego-driven indiscipline," and an error that might prove fatal. I'm not sure how well the critique hangs together, but there's some interesting stuff:

Instead of the requisite deft interweaving of righteous indignation and sunny promise that made him a political celebrity in 2004 and propelled him to the nomination in 2008, Barack Obama delivered a surprisingly strident and joyless forty-five minutes of rhetoric. The remarks should have introduced him to the American people, and shown them what the Democratic base sees in him: hope, change, can-itude, or whatever other gauzy quality made him their nominee. What the American people got was less an introduction to Barack Obama than an exposition on what Barack Obama is against. It was fantastic for the base — and especially the left-wing base, which is especially animated by its hate objects — but it was alternately boring and disturbing for everyone else. As Marc Ambinder noted from the stadium, it was basically a primary-season stump speech.
How did Obama come to fail so remarkably, having delivered so often before? The clues lie in the candidate’s character. The remarkable thing about Barack Obama is how much of a cipher he remains: he is excellent at presenting himself as a tabula rasa upon which only virtue may be written, and there should be no doubt that the effort is deliberate. John McCain’s personal flaws are well known, but Obama’s are rather elusive. Still, they exist, and they show most clearly when Obama’s subject is Obama. I first learned of his ego problems when speaking with a former law school classmate of his; and there were glimpses of it for public consumption with things like the “I have become a symbol” incident. It was not till tonight, though, that Obama’s basic internal fragility was put on stark public view. This was the biggest night of his public life, and the defining moment of his historic turn — and what did he talk about?
Barack Obama talked about John McCain.
Take a moment to feed the plain text of Obama’s acceptance speech into a weighted word-cloud generator. You’ll get something that looks like this, and you’ll note that the biggest word — signifying the noun most often invoked — is “promise,” with 32 mentions. Ordinary enough for a political speech. Next is “America,” with 28 mentions, which is also expected. Third, though, is “McCain,” with 21 mentions. It is difficult to overstate how remarkable this is: Reagan in 1980 barely mentioned Jimmy Carter, and Obama in 2004 discussed John Kerry solely because he was keynoting for the man. Set against the light of precedent and the demands of this speech, the relentless focus upon John McCain emerges as profoundly strange.

Personally I thought the speech was humdinger, but I like Obama's speechifying generally. Matt and Jesse's legitimate reservations aside, the reason I don't like political speech is that you have to pretend to take seriously something manifestly bogus. Nobody actually believes the president's going to be saving farms or mending anybody's life. Within those parameters, this one seemed to win the crowd in the stadium and at home. (I was watching with a bunch of Democrats though, so it was an easy crowd.)

I was amused that Obama went to the Patton well one more time.

In case you're wondering if there really are a lot of people at Invesco

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:35:00 EDT

I guess in some way I weep for my nation that this many people can come out on a working day to hear some politician give a speech, let alone to hear two of New Jersey's most embarrassing exports (is Southside Johnny going to make a surprise appearance too?). Still, I have to concede: Barack Obama draws a crowd. Here are some shots of the more-than-a-mile-long crowd waiting to get into the acceptance event, and a hint of the kind of logistical support this thing requires:

Our own David Weigel and cinematic master Alex Manning are in the building, and will be bringing you full video and text coverage of the audacious hopefest. The rest of us can only look on in envy, or despair, or drunkenness.

Weed Freed As Dems Dither

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:25:00 EDT

There may be no shadow convention this year, but medical marijuana believers have taken to the Invesco Field perimeter for a pot blast.

The march for pot brought out a few hundred people, not all of them Democrats. What are they trying to accomplish, given that the Dems' platform makes no mention of medical marijuana or the war on drugs? "The squeaky wheel gets the grease," said one marcher.

Gregg, the guy holding this sign, identified himself as not an Obama supporter, but said he was surprised by the Democrats' dodging of the drug war. "The party's got a lot of lawyers," he said. "The more laws the better for them, the more arrests the better for them."

Susan Squibb says she's marching to point out to the Democrats "not just the right to smoke pot, but the horrendous urine-testing industry, and the imprisoning of non-violent drug offenders, which is a terrible expense for America."

Cheesecake lady, who used to be a stock broker before she became a hippie (of course!) says the party's in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. "We don't really have a war on drugs," she said. "We have a war on people thinking for themselves... There's more cocaine on the floor on Wall Street than anywhere else. If the country really wanted to get serious about drugs they'd go after the fatcats at Bear Stearns who got the country into the mess it's in in the first place."

As this indicates, the march was something of a catch-all, with immigration and FISA also coming in for scrutiny. It's all good by me. Fight the power!

Si se puede!

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:16:00 EDT

I'll never refuse a challenge. Using several of his aliases, Lonewacko urges us to stop ignoring the story of the 2008 DNC: Mexican flags! He knows they're there, and the fact we haven't seen any just proves we're in on it.

Well it took some doing, and quite a bit of hiking around Mile High Stadium, where I believe the entire population of North America is lined up to get in. (We'll have some video of that shortly), but yes, even here La Raza is scheming to undermine the U.S.A.:

Coloring the convention

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:59:00 EDT

Here's a conspiracy theory for our time. Fox News did the pool coverage for the convention. That was a controversial development among Democrats back when the pool credentials were awarded, and it remains so now. So how is Fox executing its scheme to undermine the Democrats? According to a Coloradan I spoke with last night, they're including too many black people in the cutaway shots.

I'm not really sure how that undermines the party, and in fact I'm pretty sure the Republicans also go to great lengths to present a politically correct mix of races for the cameras during their own conventions and SOTU addresses. But when my friend explained that the cutaways keep creating the impression that half or more of the conventioneers are African-American, I realized that I'm in on the conspiracy too: Though I identified them only by affiliation, I must admit that three out of the five people I quoted in my lurker roundup yesterday were black! The truth is out: There are many black people at this convention. (Who would have guessed?)

But again, how does accurately or inaccurately depicting the racial makeup of the crowd help the GOP, hurt the Democrats, or in fact discombobulate anybody except this weirdo bean counter I was talking to? It turns out that when the bigoted troglodytes out in the Real America (which I apparently don't understand the way this guy does) get a load of all that soul, they'll flee to John McCain. (You see how it's never you who's the racist; it's those ignorant others in the heartland.)

Because the pun is so easy, I'll paraphrase the original Dr. J., and say that to endeavor to make the Democrats look bad would be like blacking the chimney. That was already done when the party itself allowed Melissa Etheridge to shamble up on stage and deliver the worst musical performance in galactic history. That rambling, tuneless, arrhythmic atrocity made me deeply, deeply ashamed to be white: