Occupy Central Square.....

....and other GOP losing strategeries.

They said that if I voted for McCain...

...the leader of the free world would be treated as a pariah where he went. And they were right.

Tecs starts seeing the light

McCarthy goes over the cliff

So we must shut Gitmo so the Supremes don't interfere, like they did in Boumedine. Got it.

ObaMcCain?

Instead of doing real work (which I'll get to just after this post), I'm posting on FCP... Does anyone else think this from time to time?

Divided By Walls of Books

Krebs' map is worth a few minutes of study. You can see there are fewer books on the red side. That doesn't mean conservatives are buying fewer books, just that they are concentrating their purchases among fewer titles. And look at the book on the bottom left of the red web-Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky's book on community organizing. (Conservatives are studying their opponent.) There's a separate cluster of readers of Obama books, people who aren't connected to any of the Bush-bashing books clustered nearby. There are no books about McCain that seem to interest either the left or the right.

Anne Applebaum vs. AA, AI, and JJ?

In this article, Applebaum, a formidable intellectual and cultural warrior in Russia, lauds McCain, but critiques Palin and the anti-Intellectualism that unfortunately pervades, in this case, the GOP: strangely, it comes from the Evangelical Wing, what Mencken called the Bible Belt (it was originally a perjorative), from the folks who often say, "The only book worth reading is the Bible" without, mind you, ever even reading it[!]; the folks who believe that Agnosticism = Nihilism, not because they hang out with Agnostics or Atheists, but rather, they "know" this because their pastors and preists tell them. I'm not saying Believer = Intellectual Laziness. What I am saying is that if I'm going to have a conversation with someone who is willing to base their lives around, say, a Bible, then shouldn't they have command of that, and every great treatise or essay written about it, from St. Augustine up through Aquinas up through Luther's Table Talks and even the crazed John Calvin and, in the New World, to the idealistic-religious John Winthrop?

If intellectual laziness is tolerated in one's own party, how can America expect to continue on a Benjamin Franklin Path when that said party is elected?

Can We Just Tax Rich Liberals?

Not a bad exchange between McCain and Letterman, demonstrating Letterman is just as quick as McCain, but it seems as though it's a little late.

CATCH THE EXCERPT ABOUT 4:15 INTO THE AUDIO-VIDEO: McCain tells Letterman that, if elected, his first executive order will be to raise Letterman's taxes in order to distribute his wealth. I like that idea.

The band played the Who's "I Can't Explain" as McCain walked onstage at the Ed Sullivan Theater. After he sat down, Letterman asked, "Can you stay?"

"Depends on how bad it gets," McCain answered.

Letterman appeared to ridicule McCain about the implication that Obama and Ayers had a relationship.

"Are they double-dating, are they going to dinner, what are they doing?" Letterman asked. "Are they driving across country?"

"Maybe going to Denny's," McCain said.

While McCain risked a rough appearance -- "I haven't had so much fun since my last interrogation," he said -- it gave him the chance to show courage in the face of fire.

What can future candidates learn from this: when Wall Street is in the throws of a recession, book Letterman and Late Night instead of D.C.

The Problem is the Captain

...not the First Mate.

A shame. In 2000 he would have made a first rate Captain. Instead we got a choice between the Gory Harvard Gerbil and the Boneless Yale Chimp. And that ship has now sunk.

"But it’s not enough. Palin may have enabled McCain to live to fight another day – and if he were to win, it would be in large measure because she energised that otherwise stay-at-home base -- but she cannot win this thing for him if he doesn’t pass muster."

Barrack Dukakis

Pepe, what gives?

Future McCain Cabinet Member

A good cabinet is stocked full of all types of dishes, cups, mugs, and stoneware. Much better than a cabinet stocked full of the same-same-same-same.

the liberal conservative Norman Mailer: "...the nihilistic maw of a national disorder..."

Read this next sentence (by Hitch) closely. It's astute: To touch on another comparison with today’s politics, Mailer noticed in Miami that Nixon had won the nomination in such a way as to also win the election: in other words, without splitting or embittering his party. These and similar reflections are of interest and value in a year when the Democratic nominee is, in one of his many protean incarnations, a Chicago South Side operator with a wife whose father was a Daley precinct captain, while the Republican candidate is a repository of something in which almost nobody in 1968 would ever have believed: America’s residual pride about its own valor in Vietnam.

A Confluence of McCain, General Sturgis, and Harley Davidson

Freak Power comes to Sturgis, South Dakota. I'm close, in southeastern Montana, on survey right now. Lots of bikes up and down every two lane highway: they all lead to Sturgis. McCain swept in there the other evening. Interesting article, for sure.