NYT:

A jogger was attacked by a rabid fox, ran a mile with the animal’s jaws clamped on her arm and then drove herself to a hospital, the authorities said. The Yavapai County sheriff’s office said the woman told deputies that she was on a trail near Prescott on Monday when the fox attacked and bit her foot. The woman said that she grabbed the fox by the neck when it went for her leg but that it bit her arm. The woman wanted the animal tested for rabies so she ran a mile to her car with the fox still biting her arm, then pried the animal off and tossed it in her trunk and drove to the Prescott hospital. The sheriff’s office said the fox later bit an animal-control officer. He and the woman are both receiving rabies vaccinations.

I just love that the writer describes her as “tossing” the fox in the trunk, as if it were a picnic blanket.

Sadly, there’s no way of settling this question, but I’m willing to bet that yesterday’s election resulted in more gallons of tears-wept-in-joy than any other in American history.

Yglesias, on the willingness of the media to call the McCain campaign on some of its nastier and stupider tricks:

It’s the infrastructure, stupid. Organizations like Think Progress, TPM Media, The Huffington Post, Media Matters, and Progressive Accountability have ensured that there are dozens of people working, every day, to shoot down bogus storylines and to highlight especially egregious behavior. And those institutions are connected to a vast web of individual or small-group blogs that together form a sea in which long-existing progressive publications like The American Prospect, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Washington Monthly all swim, all reaching much broader audiences than they could in their strictly print days. New, more progressive columnists with ties to those institutions like Harold Meyerson and Paul Krugman have joined The Washington Post and New York Times op-ed pages. Television programs open to progressive ideas hosted by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have appeared on cable.

To make a long story short, the Obama-McCain matchup is taking place in a very different media context from the Kerry-Bush matchup in 2004. And Kerry-Bush happened in a very different context than Gore-Bush in 2000. And I think it’s no coincidence that as progressive infrastructure gets bigger and stronger, it gets harder and harder for conservative media strategies to work. The press’s all-out war against Gore galvanized people and have created institutions designed to fight back against that kind of garbage.

Yes.

If you’re American and you’re looking for somewhere to park a little bit of extra cash, you might consider donating to one of the organizations Yglesias mentions. They’re going to be absolutely essential going forward, as the right-wing slime machine kicks into high gear. Everything feels wonderful today, but I suspect it won’t be long before the Clinton/Gore years look sane and balanced in comparison.

Here’s a short video to watch (unless you are sick to death of US election stuff). It’s a take-off on a series of beer ads from several years ago which had a group of friends going “Wassup?” “Wazzzzzzuuuuuupppp?” to each other on the phone.

Wassup 2008

Keep watching to the end.

I’ve always wondered why this wouldn’t work. Can someone explain to me why it wouldn’t?

The one step in my One Step Campaign Finance Reform plan is simply to create a rule that says that a politician can’t vote on any measure if they have a conflict of interest in it. They have a conflict of interest in a measure if their campaign has received money from a (corporate) party affected by the measure within the last, say, 5 years. In this way, lawmakers would be adhering to the same code of conduct to which judges are already expected to adhere. A judge recuses herself if she is asked to hear a case involving an issue in which she has a financial stake (say, a company in which she owns stock). Why shouldn’t politicians be expected to do the same?

OK, I lied. It’s not one step. You’d have to fiddle a lot with the details. For example, you need to explain “affected.”

And you’d need to set up a much more robust system of public financing to address the sharp drop in political campaign funds available to politicians. (That could and should be done in part simply by forcing broadcasters to give sharply discounted air time to political campaigns. The government regulates this area, and the public in theory owns it. So fuck ‘em if they don’t like it.)

And you would need to worry about independent groups and their semi-formal role in campaigns, especially because diverting money from political campaigns would make this an even more pressing issue. So you’d need a few supplemental rules governing the degree of coordination permitted between independent groups and political campaigns, which would reduce their usefulness to campaigns (which by the nature require tight message control and coordination).

And of course, this proposal also fails to solve the problem of bribes paid in advance. If I’m facing an expensive reelection campaign, I might vote on a measure designed to help a party that I suspect (perhaps after heavy hinting) will reward me later.

Another worry: two politicians working together might be able to get around the restrictions by agreeing to help each other’s donors.

And one more worry, just for safe measure: You’d need to address the fact that political donations sometimes go to organizations like the parties’ national campaigns, which don’t directly vote on issues. This proposal would be a disaster if it funneled a lot of money to, say, the Republican National Committee, which then had discretion over which political campaigns to divert the funds to. The result would be even more supine politicians taking their marching orders from a centralized source of funding whose intermediate role in accepting funds would be to sanitize the funds coming in to the party. So to be effective, this proposal would need to address that in some way. (Perhaps you’d add this rule: Political campaigns themselves can only receive money from “ultimate” donors. They can’t get money from “intermediate” donors, such as the party’s national organizations.)

Still, this one step would accomplish a lot, no? All the ways around the rule seem like a pain in the ass, which would, at worst, introduce a lot more friction and complication into what is currently a simple system of reciprocal back-scratching between political donors and the politicians who love them.

The beauty of this idea is that it entirely avoids the First Amendment issues that have plagued campaign finance reform in the past. Any corporation would be able to give as much money to any politician it wanted. And any politician could accept it. It’s just that that money would then disqualify the politician from benefiting the corporation. Corporations might still donate to political campaigns out of pure idealism, but . . . joking! Anyway, this proposal seems to me Supreme Court proof, which is a point strongly in its favour.

Would this work?

The main thing I took away from this debate was puzzlement. I don’t understand what McCain was even trying to do. There seemed a number of times when McCain’s main priority seemed to be playing to the base, rather than trying to reach beyond it. There was, for example, mocking a woman’s health as a reason to have an abortion. I gather from what he said that one of the stock arguments on the pro-forced birth side of the debate is that “health” has been stretched implausibly far as a justification for permitting women to have abortions. But just think how that must play to people who aren’t part of that echo chamber, regardless of their opinions about abortion. Similarly, what was up with McCain’s comments on Ayers and his mumbling on about nasty t-shirts and veterans with hats or whatever the hell he was saying? It really sounded to me like he was speaking directly to people who are already immersed in the minutiae of NOBAMA hatred. But how does this help him with the rest of the electorate? And although McCain clearly made an effort to smile and shake Obama’s hand, the anger tonight was extraordinary. Again, McCain has to know at this point that the anger does not help him get new votes. I think it cheers up the base, who desperately wants to see him vent a bit, but again, why be playing to them now?

Holy crap, old grumpy grandpa McCain said “my friends” about 100 times – each sentence!

There’s lots still to criticize in Obama’s performance, both on substance and on style. But this was an enormous improvement, as far as this Joe Six-Pack can tell.

Also, I can’t believe what McCain is willing to say about the “surge” in Iraq. His description of Iraq today is just mind-boggling.

Neither of them had any interest in answering most of the questions that they were asked.

A while back I created a new Amazon wishlist just for books I intend to get from the library (called “To Get From the Library” just to avoid confusion). It was set to private by default, but recently I was thinking about how many books I read on the recommendation of blogs and it occurred to me that people looking for something fun to read might be curious to have a peek at someone else’s reading queue. Anyway, it’s accessible here now, in case that includes you. It’s updated frequently.

Further suggestions are, of course, always welcome.

I’ve watched both the Presidential and the Vice-Presidential debates, but I haven’t had a chance yet to catch the Canadian debates (we’re having an election too, as I mentioned earlier). But if you’re curious, you can start watching here.

I meet a lot of Americans who seem to me to have an absurdly generous view of Canada and all things Canadian (except our weather). For them I’d like to point out that there’s a lot of bluster and nonsense in these debates too. (I’ll concede that there’s no one as silly as Sarah Palin here, but then again, there hasn’t been anyone as silly as Sarah Palin at that level since Dan Quayle.)

Sadly, I’m not able to vote in either election, since I’m not a Yank and Canadian election laws — at least on their current interpretation by Elections Canada — require that you have lived in Canada within the last five years.

(Thanks to Brad and “A” for the scan.)

The temporary ban on shorting stocks: OK, I get temporary pauses in trading activity when the market is all roiled and everybody just needs to calm the fuck down. But this isn’t a ban on selling stocks, just a ban on shorting them. I don’t understand much about the markets, but the little I know suggests that this is silly. I don’t get it.

Google Chrome: I’m supposed to care why? I tried it and it’s reasonably fast. But it’s not that much faster than Firefox. I read yesterday that Google will allow people to write plugins, and am therefore less mystified now by Google Chrome than I was previously. But it’ll be a long time before Chrome has a library of plugins to match Firefox’s. And did we all stop caring about privacy just because Google designs products well? Is that like how we stopped caring about intellectual property and openness when we noticed that Apple designs products well?

Ghee: It’s like . . . butter . . . but, like, you don’t need to put it in the fridge . . . for, like, a year . . . and it’s still ok. Wha-?

Next time you get to create a video from scratch to sell Obama to the millions of people that’ll view it, don’t include a clip of Obama saying, “When you have the name ‘Barack Obama,’ that’s a killer.”

Thanks.

A friend writes with some help for McCain: “i think an effective line of attack/ridicule against the new Obama/Biden ticket would run something like this: “Obama/Biden: talking the enemy to death.”

Recalling this, I think he’s probably right.

Yoon is right: a mandoo party is a great way to end up with a freezer full of yummy mandoo (Korean dumplings). If you buy in bulk, we estimate that you end up paying about 14 cents a dumpling, which is really welcome when you’re on a tight budget. And you can avoid monotony by varying how you consume them: you can put them in soups or you can fry them up.

My only concern is that if we lost our power for a long period right after filling the freezer, we’d be fucked. That hasn’t happened yet, thank goodness.

A previous adventure in mandoo-making, complete with photos, is here.

Okay, first things first.¹ One true answer to the title’s question is: not entirely. Phew. Dodged one there, didn’t you? Not so fast, though. The answer may well be “Somewhat,” in which case it behooves you to read on to see how.

Alright, I’ll admit it. It’ll behoove me if you read on. You see, I might have gotten myself into a bit of hot water, although with some thought and an even keel, this water may turn out resemble more the palliative springs of many a television boom town than the terrifying pit at the end of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The sitch is that I am giving a talk on Friday. My first talk professional talk post-grad school. And I’m nervous. I’m nervous for the usual reasons. These include the fear that I’ll make a fool of myself in the Q&A, and that my central argument is just not that good. But there is an additional, more idiosyncratic reason that I really want to think hard about before delivering the talk. And that’s the distinct possibility that while my central argument is fine, I have used a poorly chosen example to add support to my conclusion. This would leave me dialectically naked, even if my underlying argument remains cogent. So I want to try to extract myself for this situation as carefully as possible, and this is my test run.

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