I would write something here about McCain's acceptance speech except that — I swear this is true — I literally fell asleep part way through it.
(Note also this week's special Wednesday edition of Wednesday Mostly Palin Bashing.)
- Jeffrey Feldman, Frameshop: McCain Video 'Tribute' Links Iran to 9/11
- Kos, Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up — lots of people thought the McCain speech fell flat. Videos and more at JustMoreOfTheSame.com
- Crooks & Liars, Clock is Ticking as McCain Campaign Hides Palin from the Press
- Political Animal,
- NYT Editorial, Editorial: The Real John McCain
- E. J. Dionne Jr., WashPo, Elegy for a Maverick
- TMZ, Republicans Lack Heart! (GOP rips off artists yet again…)
- TMP, Mystery Solved! — why was McCain posing in front of a photo of Walter Reed Middle School (located in North Hollywood, California)? (Earlier post: Surprised.)
- Kos, Flee the Press
- Rick Perlstein, Sarah's Trigonetry. Brilliant.
- TPM on Team McCain's Editing Goof
- Matt Bodie, Prawfsblawg, Bob Dole, John McCain & Michael Lewis
- Juan Cole, Informed Comment, Rambo and the Mean Girl
- DeLong,
- Weak effort from worsethanbush.org, Real McCain of Genius: Houses
- TMP, If You Can't Stand Up to the RNC …
- Political Animal, A perfectly functioning teleprompter
- Douglas Rushkoff, Hate Party
- Political Animal, Let's define 'primary responsibilities'
- Crooks & Liars, Delusional John McCain peddles “Alaska is close to Russia” nonsense
- HuffPo, Palin Also Supported The “Road To Nowhere” (And May Still)
- Eye on Miami, McCain and Palin: volatile and unpredictable meets smug and sarcastic … by gimleteye
- Georgia10, Kos, Real Vetting Roundup
- Sarah Palin: Earmark Queen Of The Earmark State
- Kate Klonick and Zachary Roth, TPM Muckraker, Palin As Reformer? Not Quite…
- Bobo2020, Kos, PALIN-tology – Speech rebuttal – 150 issues in 1 week: “I have identified nearly 150 issues, problems, falsehoods, and embarrassing comparisons for McCain's unbelievably reckless VP choice.”
- Vanity Fair estimates the cost of Cindy McCain's convention Outfit at $300,000 — which would make it more expensive than the average home in the USA, valued at $217,800. (According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the McCains have received $313,413 thanks to George Bush's tax cut.)
- Community organizers — Martin Luther King, Susan B. Anthony — might have some differences with Palin's attack on community organizers.
- Daily Show does Palin
- BooMan, On Pitbulls and Lipstick
- Political Animal, The Truman Show
So why is it that you seem to spend inordinate amounts of energy proving that Democrat voters don’t like McCain? Is this an important thing that needs 100 links of proof each week? (if not every few days)
Besides that, would you allow this sort of clearinghouse work from your students? Do you allow your students to pawn off as facts, by implication, whatever random ramblings they find on the Internet?
Seriously, I know you are trying to get Obama to adopt you or something, but don’t you think people who are going to read your blog might actually be smart enough to find the latest on the Daily Kos on their own? Maybe we all just need to agree that Obama is your honorary daddy, and then we can all go back to talking about interesting LEGAL issues that might come up from time to time, or actual politics. Seriously, this weekly big waste of time and energy is getting tiresome. Especially from a guy who claims to be sick of the trivial nature of the political discourse.
I think lots of folks are wondering what you think of the Biden pick, which you’ve been strangly silent on, while wasting electron after electron dishing on Palin.
This blog is much more my hobby, than my job. I pay for the account, and it’s run completely independently of the law school. I don’t approach the non-legal postings here with the attitude that I have to attempt to commit scholarship. If I did, there would be far fewer of them. You want scholarship, I hope very careful scholarship, please go to law.tm and poke around.
So, no, I’d never accept student work for credit of the nature of most of the things I write here. (Where did that idea come from?) They aren’t presented to you for credit. And they aren’t presented to my employer for credit either (unlike some other online activities, which I do claim as public service in my annual review). Most of what I say during the day isn’t scholarly quality stuff either; think of this as that sort of conversation.
Why the links compilations? I’m reading the stuff anyway, and it amuses me to compile it. You like it, you read it. (Some people seem to like it, if my email is to be believed.) You don’t like it, no problem, read the next entry. This blog has never been about purely legal topics, and to the extent that I’ve blogged legal stuff it’s almost always NOT what I’m working on anyway.
As this is a hobby and not a paid gig, I don’t feel the slightest obligation to opine on anything or everything. I’ve said nothing about Biden primarily because — this may shock you — I have nothing interesting to say about Joe Biden. But since you ask so nicely, here goes:
Biden seems to me like an OK choice. He wasn’t in my top three, he wasn’t in my bottom three. Compelling personal story. I like much of his legislative record, although there are things I don’t like too. I like the way he’s been campaigning since he got the nod. The Neil Kinnock thing used to worry me until I learned that he’d credited Kinnock in several previous speeches, and probably skipped a paragraph while on auto-pilot on the day in question. Not great, but not as bad as I thought either. More an old moderate-to-slightly-liberal lion than a high-tech progressive, but that’s OK.
If some tragedy were suddenly to make Biden President I would not fear for the Republic. If some tragedy were to make either McCain or Palin President, I would.
There. That wasn’t very interesting, was it?
As for Palin, I don’t think attention paid to her is at all wasted: there’s a lot left to learn there, and as we learn it the choice illuminates something unattractive about McCain. It suggests to me a fighter-pilot style of thinking: quick, impulsive, going for the killer shot — even when not prepared. Combined with his suggestion that the US should have intervened in force on the side of the Georgians, it keeps me awake at night (so long as McCain isn’t actually talking…).
Fair enough, but you don’t really seem to choose what you put in your blog by whether or not you have anything interesting to say about it. An unofficial memory poll indicates that you have LOTS of “posts” which are little more than a link to someone else’s work, with a brief comment from you along the lines of “this is pretty funny,” or “this doesn’t bode well for X.” That’s not saying anything about anything, it’s just filling space.
I appreciate it’s a hobby, but you aren’t actually doing anything most of the time but linking to other people’s hard work. Maybe you don’t have anything interesting to say about Biden (that much is clear), but you don’t have anything interesting to say about McCain, Obama, or Palin either, based on the fact that what you do “say” is just some brief, often snide, comment and, once again, a link to the actual work of others. You just let others do all the heavy lifting (which is your right, but why bother?)
You are, apparently, a law professor who makes his living on the use of language and argument, yet you employ virtually none of it here. This blog is very often little more than a “see, I think just like you guys” sign, useful for little more than making sure some set of collegues understands you are “cool” like they are.
You are fully capable of much better, and while nothing compells you to make the effort on this blog, I sure hope your academic efforts contain more substance. And perhaps I am alone in this, but I’d like to think that you don’t just blog to have a web presence, like some smarmy basement-dweller, but perhaps to have an outlet for ideas that a classroom would be an inopportune location to express. You have no responsibility to do anything substantive with this blog, but I think it would be valuable if you did.
This is just my vote to cut back on some of the really pointless lists of links to attacks on candidates you have nothing to say about otherwise. This is one step away from not voting, but spending four years complaining about who got elected. DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR BLOG! (or stop complaining with what other might choose to do with their efforts)