So my apologies in advance for adding to the noise. I’m going to write just this one leetle post regarding the presidential stuff and call it good.

Matt Taibbi is over the top in his Mad Dog Palin editorial in Rolling Stone. But, if you can separate out the wheat from the chaff, you eventually get to this good paragraph:

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains.

It’s an important point, and one that I agree with. Unfortunately, if you read that Taibbi piece and found yourself cheering on his vitriol, congratulations! you’ve just unwittingly committed exactly the same sort of intellectual laziness that the Palin-supporters are stereotyped for.

Suzanne Garment’s best point during her Palin-Biden debate analysis:

Palin’s voice was high, perky, earnest, naive, twangy, aw-shucks and altogether unreflective of the weariness, ironies ambiguities that we expect from a leader who has seen and understood the world.

That was what Palin’s voice sounded like to cosmopolitans. Clearly, it did not sound that way to much of the country. Lots of Americans actually talk the way Palin talks.

Indeed they do. And the inability for the “liberal elite” to understand that fact is slightly maddening to me, because the misunderstanding usually comes along with a healthy scoop of superiority as well. Ignorance and close-mindedness are equally distributed on both sides of the aisle.

John Meacham writes a nice editorial titled The Palin Problem and makes a devastating point:

Palin is on the ticket because she connects with everyday Americans. [...] But that honest explanation of the rationale for her candidacy raises an important question. Do we want leaders who are everyday folks, or do we want leaders who understand everyday folks? Therein lies an enormous difference [...]

Obviously, Meacham is saying that Palin is an everday folk. And whether she actually is or is not makes not one whit of difference because perception is reality and there is a significant portion of our country’s population that wants an everyday folk in high office.

As my political ideology matures, I’m increasingly thinking that we need to take a Just Say No! stance towards populism. Colorado has horrible constitutional amendments that are causing real budget problems because it’s so easy to cram just about anything onto a state-level ballot.

A story in Rolling Stone titled Make-Believe Maverick is a semi-hatchet job on McCain, but if you read between the lines and with a liberal dosage of salt, it does cast more than a little doubt onto the true character of the man. Which is a kinda important point, considering a large plank in his platform is his character.

I was a fan of the McCain story during the 2000 election and during the 2008 Republican primaries, when I didn’t know much about him, and he wasn’t doing crazy things like suspending his campaign to “help” solve the bailout or making cynical VP choices. The media often make references to McCain’s famous temper but never really gives any backstory to what’s going on. Dickinson’s article, clearly slanted and not to be taken as gospel, does help you get a little closer to what the true story might be, and even if it’s somewhere in the middle, the idea of McCain as CINC makes me pretty uncomfortable.

Finally, if you can’t get your fill on campaign status updates, you need to read http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/. The tagline is “electoral projections done right” and I’m inclined to agree.

Ok, that’s enough — I promise to not blog about the presidential race anymore.

[The Colorado ballot has about 10 or 12 new amendments up for vote, and I plan on spewing a bit on those. ;)]

Peter Norvig has an election FAQ. My favourite part were these two charts that place into context what McCain and Palin have been harping on.

Above are the earmarks that McCain was so angry about in the first debate.

Below is describes the offshore drilling that Palin hopes will bring energy independence to America.

Read Norvig’s FAQ and decide for yourself. There are lots more good graphs there, including a nice one on taxes.

My blatant rip-off of Tyler’s “best sentence I read today” meme comes from Tyler himself today as he answers what will happen with the dollar?:

Bush, Bernanke, Paulson — we call them leaders. The Chinese think of them as the customer service department.

Please remind me why I should listen to you, considering you are famous because you can memorize someone else’s thoughts. I will say that you are the prettiest huffaz I’ve seen.

I thought “rocking the vote” went out of vogue at the same time as “cowabunga”.

Once you get connected to the right operator, just tell them your license plate number and they will respond with the location of your car. Big brother saves the day! Sweet!

The roast on the left is better.

The evite sender puts my email address into some 3rd-party website, which I never asked for. They claim they will never sell my email address, but why should I trust them? If I wanted evite to have my address, I would have sent it to them.

As an evite recipient, I get a spam in my inbox. Ok, fine, I get lots of emails. But an evite email doesn’t give you the fucking information!. It’s just useless noise — “hi! I sent you an email! But it’s empty! You should really go to this web page instead!”

What a waste.

Today, I realized that evite does one thing correct: it sets the Reply-to: field to the original sender’s email address. So from now on, I’m just going to respond via email and let the sender keep track of me the old-fashioned way.

I need about 7k more miles this year to maintain my Premier status on United. Turns out round-trip from Denver to Honolulu is just enough.

United has a sale right now so that it’s only $249 each way (or thereabouts). I priced it last night, and cheapest I could find was $550, but that’s still a pretty good deal.

We’d have to complete our trip by November 19, so a Thanksgiving trip is out. I’d settle for a nice 4-day weekend. I can only take so much of the beach anyhow…

I’m completely serious. If you’re interested, email me or post a comment.

I’ve been feeling a little unstuck as of late so it’s good to be home.

An incomplete pastiche of random thoughts…

Small is beautiful. I’m Portland over Seattle; Grenoble over Zurich.

Watching Linus get beat at Wii tennis was insanely amusing.

The Benson Hotel has the best amenity ever: companion fish. They will give you a complimentary goldfish for your room during your stay to keep you company. What a nice touch.

Compare and contrast DEN vs PDX. PDX to downtown: hop on the light rail in the actual terminal, and $2.30 and 30 minutes later, you’re in the heart of Portland. DEN to downtown, maybe Coors Field: minimum of 2 transfers on a confusing bus system, and takes at least an hour (when the city is actually only 20 minutes away by car). Or, if you want to go to Fort Collins, you pay $35 for a one-way bus that leaves every two hours and extends the normal 1 hour trip to 1.5 hours. That is pathetic.

I need a smaller laptop. I was able to do a 2-week international trip with carry-on only, but lugging around the laptop was brutal. My camera took up 1/3 of my luggage volume, but that was worth it. On the whole, I still feel like I brought too many clothes. Damn you, boy scouts.

Pražský hrad (aka the Prague Castle) is worth seeing, even if there are always too many tourists and even though it’s slightly over-commercialized.