Speaking of Rick Perry’s chance at a new life, I think I just discovered a big part of why he fared so poorly in this campaign. Seems he wasn’t even entirely sure what office he was running for. Which is it, sir? Which is it?!?!
It’s obviously very important to Mitt Romney that people understand with absolute clarity what his position is on the release of his tax returns. To help him out, I’ve enlisted Kermit the Frog to reiterate Mr. Romney’s explanation from last night’s debate.
Something to ready your mind for the Granite State pandering we’re all about to (voluntarily) endure at tonight’s GOP debate: From yesterday’s New York Times on New Hampshire’s mavericky electorate.
John Hopwood, 52, an unemployed editor from Manchester . . . said he usually voted Democratic — he voted for Bill Richardson in the 2008 Democratic primary and then for Mr. Obama in November — but was disappointed in the administration. He said he was considering Mr. Huntsman and Mr. Gingrich but was unsure which way he would go.
In the end, he said, “I’ll probably vote Democratic and write in Hillary.”
This needs to be called what it is: stupid. If you’re really torn between left-of-center Democrats and the hardest, wing-nuttiest of the right, then you have no idea what’s going on. What could possibly be the swaying factors among this disparate array of candidates — a group of which, at the extreme ends from the Democrats to Newt-Freaking-Gingrich, have essentially nothing in common other than that they are mammals.
This is not being independent. This is being ignorant. And these are the people to which general election candidates have to cater. Jeebus help us.
At The Loop, Matt Alexander predicts the coming demise of e-ink-based readers. His contention, which may be right, is that the rapid evolution and decreasing prices of tablets will render “electronic paper” to sub-niche status. I can believe that if what we now know of as tablets become so crisp and readable for long durations, then yes, e-ink will no longer have much of a purpose.
But here’s where I disagree. Alexander writes:
While I’d say there is much evolution to come for magazines, the e-book, above all others, is overdue for modernization. I love my Kindle Touch for what it is, but it does little to take the concept of the printed word and evolve it. The e-ink display serves its purpose well, but as the concept of the printed word evolves, so too must the technology around it.
I don’t think this is quite right, because I think if anything, the rise of the Kindle has proven that there remains a great desire in the culture and in the market for long-form reading, reading in the form of what we know of as books. And traditional books need no additional bells and whistles.
As much as some kind of “enhancement” for books is predicted by many in the tech blogosphere, I think the novel, the short story, and most nonfiction is best suited to be presented as clearly readable text, and almost nothing else.
Books, on the whole, don’t need a bevy of video easter eggs or audio atmosphere or anything like that. Linking to a dictionary or encyclopedia to look up unfamiliar terms? Great, and e-ink does it. A way to make notes and highlights? Done. Better ways to navigate indexes or to recall characters or ideas? Kindle’s “X-Ray” feature is just the first step in that. There’s almost nothing else one would even want to have added to that mix. (And I should note that Alexander himself is a huge proponent of the latest e-ink Kindle.)
This is not to say that the book or the printed word must not or need not evolve. It’s wonderful to think of what new media may arise with these emerging technologies. But they will rise alongside traditional forms. They will share, at it were, shelf space with our newly-digitized old-school books. And that’s great.
So for these reasons I think e-ink has a longer life ahead of it than Alexander gives it credit for. It may be that more “tablety” displays reach a point of convergence at which e-ink is no longer necessary, but that won’t be because of some enormous shift in what “book” means.
Dearest liberal brethren: Still not sure whether Ron Paul is the “sensible” Republican (see my post arguing that he most certainly is not). Read this article from Michelle Goldberg and try not to shudder:
It might seem that Paul’s libertarianism is the very opposite of theocracy, but that’s true only if you want to impose theocracy at the federal level. In general, Christian Reconstructionists favor a radically decentralized society, with communities ruled by male religious patriarchs. Freed from the power of the Supreme Court and the federal government, they believe that local governments could adopt official religions and enforce biblical law.
“One of the things we forget is that when the Constitution was passed, even though the Bill of Rights said there was going to be no federal religions, every state in the union had basically a state religion and the Constitution was not designed to overturn that,” says [Brian D. Nolder, pastor of Christ the Redeemer Church in Pella, Iowa]. Among Reconstructionists, he says, “there’s a desire for a theocracy, but it has to be one from the bottom up, not from the top down.”
She concludes:
Thus, Paul has been able to create one of the strangest coalitions in American political history, bringing together libertarian hipsters with those who want to subject the sexually impure to Taliban-style public stonings. (Stoning is Reconstructionists’ preferred method of execution because it is both biblical and fiscally responsible, rocks being, in North’s words, “cheap, plentiful, and convenient.”)
So on top of the UN paranoia and the stripping of government help from all those in need, Paul is amassing support from the worst kind of Bronze Age, provincial, theocratic tribalism. To be fair, there’s nothing in this piece that asserts Paul’s own belief in this ideology, but he has gone on record as stating that America is an explicitly Christian nation and dismisses the notion of church-state separation as codified by his revered Constitution, and, as Goldberg notes, he has happily trumpeted the support of some of the worst, most backward theocrats imaginable.
Next time you see liberals swoon over Paul in some TV appearance, lamenting that the other GOPers can’t be more like him, think of this.
"I have not yet BEGUN to crazy!"
If you’re in the spheres of my online social networks, you may have noticed that I’ve had a certain fixation on the more insane or upsetting aspects of the Ron Paul candidacy. Call it schadenfreude if you like, or malicious cherry-picking, but I’ve felt compelled to highlight things about Paul that show his more hard-right or bizarrely conspiratorial musings. (I’ve had some thoughts about him on this blog as well.)
I’ve only now realized why this is so. It’s not the same motivation I have for, say, mocking Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann – they’re more pure comedy. Well, not pure, because there’s a hefty dose of revulsion in there. But you get my point. It’s motivated instead by what I perceive to be liberals’ sympathy for Ron Paul. He seems to keep being blessed by folks all over the progressive spectrum as “the Republican who we trust.”
Why is this? Ron Paul is by no means a sympathetic character for liberals: he’s by most accounts a rock-solid, hard-line cultural conservative. Though he may not always want the federal government to legislate on behalf of cultural conservatism, he seems to have no qualms about states doing so. He’s fully committed to opposition to the cornerstone of contemporary liberalism: the welfare state. Liberals as we know them today are descended directly from the policies of the New Deal, the basis of which was government aggressively imposing itself on the economy in order to triage a collapsed economy. But any government-based program that in any way lends support to those who need a small assist is anathema to Paul’s ideology.
What liberals really seem to like about Ron Paul are his support for ending the drug war and, most importantly, his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the last election cycle, when the Iraq War was among the most salient of all issues, Paul stood out among the GOP field for opposing the party line. Democrats and liberals, frantic with their opposition to the war and to the president that birthed it, deified Paul as the sensible Republican almost solely because of his position on one particular war.
But liberals, I think, would be hard-pressed to take Paul’s larger foreign policy vision seriously, a vision that involves loopy scare theories about the UN taking over the country and other such nonsense. And none of this even takes into account those horrible newsletters, which I think should make the entire mainstream political world shudder. Whether Paul penned those screeds himself is almost immaterial, as he allowed his name to be attached to, and then profit from, their vileness.
In other words, liberals need to stop thinking of Ron Paul as the adorable old uncle who, while he holds some antiquated views, has the right idea at heart. No, sorry. With opposition to the Iraq invasion and his opposition to our absurd drug laws, Ron Paul is almost the definition of the proverbial stopped clock; he’s been right essentially twice. Ever. But his support for Christianist social conservatism, his belief that the government should leave its people to suffer merely on a haughty principle, and his batty ideas about supervillain conspiracies trump all of that.
So stop admiring him. If nothing else, liberals should be heartily relieved that Paul has no chance of becoming president.
