Chase Utley is So F'ing Dreamy

Daily Dose

Scary to Think About

I think Andrew Sullivan has helped me realize why I have so much difficulty talking about the recent attacks on Obama by Palin and McCain.

From one of his readers:

What McCain and Palin are doing now makes the Clinton campaign look tame. It occurs to me that they are "legitimizing" putting Obama's life in danger by pushing this nonsense. The first potential Black President is always going to have that problem, hell Bush had people trying to take him out, I'm sure, but this is really raising the threat level.

Saying your opponent is unfit is one thing, suggesting that he is a evil, a friend of terrorists and a danger to the United States is something else entirely.

Another reader today took the first comment a little farther:

"Your post on "The Danger of Obama" immediately brought to mind what happened here in Israel in the period leading up to Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. Even allowing for the differences in political culture between the two countries, some of the sounds we're hearing in the public debate around the election have a haunting echo. Here no one would have thought it possible that an Israeli Jew would take the life of a high official. There's little doubt that the crescendo of demonization toward Rabin – including accusations of treason, flyers picturing Rabin as an SS officer – and the difficulty, in a society guaranteeing free speech, of 'civilizing' the public debate before it creates a fertile bed for actual violence, all helped create the context in which Rabin's murderer decided to take matters into his own hands."

Daily Dose

Send Barack Your Baby

The site itself is mildly funny. I just like the photos of babies with Obama stuff on.

[Slate]

Literally the Most Fun Presidential Debate Drinking Game 2.0

Okay. So tonight we have...another debate! Woot! I don't think I will be drinking tonight (I try not to drink until Thursdays). But just in case, here's Literally the Most Fun Presidential Debate Drinking Game Ever 2.0. You'll notice that a lot of it was the same as the first version; I figured a lot of stuff still applied, so I just tweaked it a little.

Literally the Most Fun Presidential Debate Drinking Game Ever 2.0

-As a warm up, chug your drink if both candidates show up, but Sarah Palin does not.
-Take one sip of the drink of the person to your right every time McCain starts a sentence with "my friends"
-Take one sip of the drink of the person to your left every time Obama starts a sentence with "look."
-Take one sip every time McCain contradicts himself in the same sentence.
-Take a sip every time McCain says "maverick"
-Take a sip every time Obama says "change"
-Take a sip every time either candidate says "same old failed policies"
-Drink the entire length of every pause Obama takes between the subject and predicate of a sentence.
-Drink for 2 seconds every time Wall Street and Main Street are mentioned in the same sentence.
-Drink for 4 seconds every time either candidate blames the media for misrepresenting him.
-Drink for 5 and a half seconds every time McCain mentions being a POW. If you finish your drink, break the can/bottle/glass on your forehead.
-Toast your neighbors and drink for 8 seconds every time Obama compares McCain to Bush.
-Drink for 10 seconds every time McCain's face turns red and he is obviously counting backwards in his head.
-Get on your knees, look to Russia, make the sign of the cross, and chug your drink whenever Sarah Palin is mentioned.
-Waterfall every time McCain says Rezko, Wright, or Ayers.
-Waterfall every time Obama says Davis, Fiorina, Gramm, or Keating.
-Chug is by the end of this debate, you still think your candidate is the winner.

Bonuses Rules for Audience Members Who Ask Questions (this is a Townhall):
-Take a sip for every volunteer who is male and has a pony tail.
-Take a sip if every volunteer who angrily lets both candidates know he/she doesn't support the bailout.
-Take a sip for every question that you just know was a set-up.
-Take a sip for every time either candidate looks visibly annoyed at the question.
-Take a sip for every volunteer who asks if he/she could have Obama's autograph after the show.
-Take a sip for every volunteer who asks if they could meet Bristol Palin after the show.
-Take a sip for every time Meghan McCain looks pissed that no one asked about her.
-Take 17.76 sips if one volunteer mentions Ron Paul.

I really don't have much to say today, if you haven't already noticed. I think a lot of the McCain campaign's actions over the last few days speak for themselves--welcoming cries of "terrorist!" and "kill him!" from their crowds when mentioning Obama, stirring up supporters against the media. Do I really need to say anything?

How about this? Our nation is in the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Unemployment is at 6.1% and we lost 160,000 jobs last month (and counting). We are waging two wars, losing one against a group that actually attacked us, and possibly never leaving the second, a misdirected front at best. 47 million people in this country do not have healthcare. American students rank 17 out of 30 industrialized nations in math and science. We are paying $4 a gallon for gasoline with no real plausible solution for energy independence. Arctic sea ice shrank to its lowest level ever last month, threatening the makeup of our planet as we know it.

Should I go on?

Daily Dose

Oh, Jon, what would we do without you?

Good Question (And Good Answer)

Why is Alaska the "real America" and Hawaii not? Timothy Noah for Slate answers.

"But if it's really true, as Palin said in the debate, that Americans are tired of 'constantly looking backwards,' then perhaps it's time we noticed that, as Rachael Larimore points out in Slate's 'XX Factor' blog, 80 percent of the U.S. population lives in metropolitan areas. We city-dwellers make no claim to being more "authentically American" than Alaskans or the inhabitants of any of this country's many other big open spaces. But we are, by dispassionate numerical reckoning, more typical. And while most people probably don't think of Hawaii as an urban state, 70 percent of its 1.3 million inhabitants live in and around Honolulu, the state's biggest city. In Alaska, by contrast, only 42 percent of its 670,000 inhabitants live in and around Anchorage, that state's biggest city. So if either of the last two states admitted to the union has any claim to being more characteristic of the nation as a whole, it's Hawaii, not Alaska."

If Only We Could Vote Tomorrow (And Some of Us Can)

Check out this article about how much of an effect black voter registration is having and could potentially have in Deep Red states like Georgia.

Quote: "Early voting is underway in Georgia, and according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, black voters do not represent 30 percent of Georgia's early voter turnout. Instead, they represent almost 40 percent. Although early voting figures can be idiosyncratic , Barack Obama certainly seems to be having little trouble getting his vote out. Indeed, Barack Obama is winning Georgia right now."

Granted, this is early voting and very early indeed. But these are the first signs that this election will be starkly different from any other we've seen before. As if I had to tell you that.

Attack Ads and Approval Ratings

This shouldn't come as a surprise, as it is now a little less than one month before the election, but the McCain campaign has stepped up its attacks on Barack Obama's character. In the past few days, the McCain campaign has made it very clear that they are hoping to "turn the page" on economic issues and focus on Obama as a person, as if the passing of the bailout package on Friday suddenly made people forget how dire their financial situations still are (indeed, the bailout did little for markets today, as the Dow falls below 10,000).

Sarah Palin this weekend started hitting Obama for his "relationship" with William Ayers, saying Obama has been "palling around with terrorists." Of course it's valid to question someone's political affiliations (even though, in this case, I think the relationship is dubious at best), but if I were the McCain campaign, I would be careful who's calling out whose character. This week in Rolling Stone, there is a scathing biography of John McCain that calls into question his character and judgement, as well as his involvement in the Keating Five. This is an article from Rolling Stone, so you have to take things with a grain of salt (aside: I don't subscribe to the whole "liberal media bias" thing, but I know the difference between Fox News and Mother Jones). But even allowing for a little bias, this article calls into question a lot about McCain as a person, as a leader, as a thinker, which, to me, is much more relevant to his ability to be President then a member of the Weather Underground holding a small-fundraiser for you in his living room, 30 years after the fact. No one is perfect, but it's the relevance of our imperfections that matters.

Besides that fact that the country has real problems it actually cares about at the moment and voters want to hear about the issues, these attacks on Obama for Ayers and Reverend Wright won't work. You know why? Because they haven't. These are stories we heard for months in the primaries; they're old news. Not only that, but the country is clearly not interested in what will be seen as another gimmick by the floundering McCain campaign. Check out McCain's favorable ratings:Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com says: "What's interesting is that, with the exception of the past couple of weeks, McCain's and Obama's ratings have been fairly strongly correlated, tending to rise and fall together. This is not to say that negative campaigning doesn't work -- it sometimes does -- but it works at diminished efficiency, because you may be giving back 50 cents on the dollar by harming your own approval scores."

So I say, good luck trying to bring down Obama, John. You're just bringing yourself (and your chances of winning) down with it.

More: Thanks TPM for drawing my attention to Joe Klein's piece today. "I'm of two minds about how to deal with the McCain campaign's further descent into ugliness. Their strategy is simple: you throw crap against a wall and then giggle as the media try to analyze the putresence in a way that conveys a sense of balance: "Well, it is bull-pucky, but the splatter pattern is interesting..." which, of course, only serves to get your perverse message out. I really don't want to be a part of that."

Did I Mention I Was a Maverick?

Sundays are becoming one of my favorite days of the week. In college, I always had that feeling of "I should be doing some work or something." I don't think much work really ever got done on Sundays, but the guilt was there. Now, all I have to do is watch sports, clean the apartment and read the Sunday NYT. I love the Sunday NYT. It takes me all day to read and the magazine lasts me the week. Frank Rich writes on Sundays and I get a reprise of Maureen Dowd's crazies. It also includes my favorite NYT section: Week in Review. Week in Review is pithy and smart. It takes all the confusion of the week and helps to put into focus what is important about it all. It's also usually very funny.

This Sunday's Week in Review included a short article that addressed something I had been thinking about a lot recently but hadn't gotten around the research. It's the McCain campaign's favorite word: maverick. John Schwartz traces the term "maverick" to a particular "family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s." Basically, the article goes on to explain how the term "maverick" was coined after the Maverick family, who had a long history of not branding their cattle and standing up for people who didn't have voices in society.

Even if you set aside the fact that the Maverick family has championed progressive ideas for centuries, something the McCain campaign most certainly does not, I think the most backwards part about McCain's overuse of "maverick" is that he and Sarah Palin have made it a label--exactly the opposite of what Samuel Augustus Maverick was known for. When you start calling yourself a maverick over and over, as McCain and Palin are apt to do, you are branding yourself. It's inauthentic, at best. More on this later.

Monday Sports Update

Thank god for the Phillies. This was another busy weekend for me and sports and, by Sunday, it had the potential to turn into a pretty depressing scene. All in all, I came out 2 for 3, which isn't bad, with the Phillies finally taking the NLDS and moving on to the next round of the playoffs.


Okay so the Phillies were up 2-0 in the NLDS against the Milwaukee Brewers heading into Milwaukee on Saturday evening. I was pumped, Boyfriend was pumped, but we were both very cautious. Milwaukee has a dome stadium (which I think is stupid--you can't play baseball indoors), so it tends to get really loud in there. Jamie Moyer was pitching and he is, well, Jamie Moyer, so his "fastball" usually doesn't reach higher than 84 mph. He's a steady force on the team and can usually get some good strikeouts with young teams, like the Brewers, who can be impatient with his contempletive pitching style and swing at everything. Unfortunately, the Brewers came prepared and dashed the Phils' hopes of a sweep, beating the Phils 4-1. Boyfriend and I left the bar where we watched the game in almost-silence and just went home for the night.

So Sunday rolled around and we were set to play the Brewers at 1pm, in Milwaukee. Boyfriend and I watched the game in our pajamas on the couch, hoping for the best and fearing for the worst. Although, if we lost, the teams would head back to Philly for a Cole Hamels start, I just wanted to nip it right there and then. So Jimmy Rollins leads off like always and bam! Solo home run, right off the bat. I couldn't believe it. I started to relax a little. Then in the 3rd, Pat the Bat--who the Brewers walked Ryan Howard to get to--shot one high into left for a 3-run homer and the Phils were up 4-1. He would have another solo shot in the 8th. Jayson Werth would also have a home run, right after Burrell's in the 3rd. It was really some kind of bizarro world, where Joe Blanton pitched a really solid 6+ innings and Pat Burrell was the hitting machine we've grown to love (and tease) over 9 years. So the Phillies leave Milwaukee with a 6-2 win and the NLDS behind them. Indeed, it is a good day to be a Phillies fan.

Now the Phillies face Manny Ramirez and the Dodgers on Thursday for Game 1 of the NLCS. It should be a great match-up, with the Phillies at home and Cole Hamels on the mound.

Penn State played Purdue on Saturday at noon. I'll be honest, even though it was on ESPN, I was in and out of sleep for most of it. But I was happy to find out that we did indeed win on the road, 20-6, in another Big Team match-up. The Nittany Lions are now 6-0 and are ranked #6. But we have three huge games coming up in the next three weeks that will really determine our season: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio State. Although those teams haven't performed as well this year as they have other years, these are all Big Ten rivalries in which many more factors come into play than just talent. I just hope JoePa will make it through the season.

Okay so now the Eagles. Fortunately for us, the game against the Redskins was on at the same time as the Phillies on Sunday, so we didn't have to watch it's awfulness. Boyfriend was following the game on Gamecast, so we at least knew what was happening and for a while, we were relieved. By the end of the first quarter, the Eagles had a comfortable 14-0 lead. But then slowly we watched the points in the WAS column increase, little by little. 14-3. 14-6. 14-9. All the while, the PHI column was at a standstill. By the end of the game, the Redskins had outdone the Birds: outplayed, outran, outdefended, outplaycalled, outscored, 23-17. Another embarrassing loss from a team that we all thought was better than that. Apparently, they think they're better than that too, but can't do anything about it but whine. They need a new coach, a new kicker, and a new attitude. Until then, they can have fun at the bottom of the NFC East--again. The Phillies really need to make it as far into the playoffs as possible because I don't think I'll survive on Eagles alone.

Bring On Mannywood!

[philly.com]