McCain Campaign Goes After Andrew Sullivan

The McCain campaign has been attacking the media all week, a move that seems like idiotic strategy to me. The people who are persuaded by that kind of attack already are voting for McCain. Everybody else will just dismiss it as whining, which is pretty low on the list of presidential verbs.

McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb recently leaked two private emails from blogger Andrew Sullivan to the media:

1. "I'm very sorry to say, it's come to this: can you confirm on the record that Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's biological son? ... Since this is a crazy idea, it should be easy for you or someone to let me know, the most popular one-man political blog site in the world, what the truth is."

2. "I asked a simple question akin to asking whether you can confirm that the sky is blue. Here's the question in case it got lost: can you confirm on the record that Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's biological son? Can I please get a response of some sort, even if it is that you will not respond?"

The point of sending the emails out, Goldfarb told Howard Kurtz, was to show "the insanity that this campaign has had to put up with for the last month."

Sullivan didn't do anything wrong here by privately pressing the campaign to answer a question that would knock down some wild speculation. Political reporters undoubtedly are doing that all the time, given the amount of rumors and unsourced claims that fly around blogs during the heat of a presidential campaign. Instead of dealing with Sullivan or ignoring him, Goldfarb sought to embarrass one of the most well-read political bloggers, a conservative who has become a strong critic of McCain during this election. Doesn't McCain's campaign have better things to do at the moment than settle scores?

Politics · 2008/09/24 · 14 COMMENTS · Link

CW Orders Full Season of '90210'

Bad news for my TV Death Pool -- The CW has already ordered a full season of the new 90210:

... if early ratings are any indication, there are plenty of fans—some nostalgic, some too young to know that 90210 had a hipper-than-though predecessor—who will be along for the ride.

Nearly 12.7 million viewers caught one -- or both -- airings of the series premiere a few weeks ago, and 90210's Sept. 2 debut became the CW's highest-rated premiere ever among women ages 18 to 34.

I watched the first four episodes of this show hoping to see a trainwreck of epic proportions, but it's a bland teen drama distinguished primarily by its disturbingly thin cast members. Actresses Shenae Grimes and Jessica Stroup weigh less than 200 pounds combined. The show tries to keep nostalgic old people around by rationing out occasional scenes of Jennie Garth. For four weeks, characters awkwardly referred to Kelly Taylor's baby daddy only as "him," leaving viewers guessing whether he was Brandon, Dylan, Steve or my personal choice, Nat the elderly proprietor of the Peach Pit.

Television · 2008/09/23 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Sanders: Socialism for Rich, Free Enterprise for Poor

Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, makes a point I haven't heard anywhere else in his response to the bailout plan:

We must end the danger posed by companies that are "too big too fail," that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up. Right now, for example, the Bank of America, the nation's largest depository institution, has absorbed Countrywide, the nation's largest mortgage lender, and Merrill Lynch, the nation's largest brokerage house. We should not be trying to solve the current financial crisis by creating even larger, more powerful institutions. Their failure could cause even more harm to the entire economy.

Sanders strongly opposes the bailout, calling it "socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor." He's right that the phrase "too big to fail" -- which is practically accepted wisdom at this point among Republicans and Democrats alike -- is a compelling argument to break these ginormous companies up. That would be a massive intrusion into the free market by government, of course, but so is making taxpayers assume the debt for private companies that drove themselves to ruin.

Politics · Business · 2008/09/22 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Cady McClain on Sarah Palin

Because I'm still not over the death of All My Children's Dixie Cooney Chandler Martin Bodine Martin, who died in 2007 after eating poisoned peanut butter pancakes meant for her daughter-in-law, I've been keeping up with the personal weblog where her portrayer Cady McClain journals life after death.

McClain has a rep for being fairly opinionated, as you can see from her post yesterday about Sarah Palin:

... I think Sarah Palin is the worst thing to come to politics in a long time. Overly aggressive, blindly opinionated, savagely ambitious, I would not consider it beyond her to manipulate her way into the presidential seat by arranging McCain's untimely death. She thinks its okay to ban books from a library! She thinks man has nothing to do global warming! She thinks polar bears are not an endangered species! She has these supposed "christian values" but married because she was pregnant and now her underage daughter is doing the same thing? She is a moron and a hypocrite and there is no way in hell I am voting for McCain with her on the ticket. Oh and by the way, she had one of her employees call a blogger who was questioning some of her policies online and tell her "Stop blogging! Stop blogging now!" WTF?! This is what we can look forward to: the end of freedom of speech, more humanitarian policies destroyed by greed, the end of women's rights over their bodies, banned books, and boiling hot summers! They try to tell us, "these are her personal beliefs and she hasn't tried to put these policies into her lawmaking!" I say that's total --------. Do they think we're ------- stupid?

She had me at "worst."

Television · Politics · 2008/09/19 · 23 COMMENTS · Link

New Comment Pages Added to Workbench

I spent a little time this morning improving the comment system on Workbench. There's now a comments page that shows the 50 most recent comments submitted to the weblog.

After you submit a comment here, the site will store your name and home page link in cookies for 180 days so you don't have to type them in again.

I've also added a line to the site's moderation policy: "Comments that have nothing to do with the subject of a post will be deleted." There's too much off-topic noise here. I'm not interested in seeing every single post I write turned into an opportunity to rant against liberals or the policies I follow on the Drudge Retort. If you have a beef about the Retort or the liberal slant of the site, take it up there.

Comments that I delete on this blog are published for a few days on a new deleted comments page. So if you've posted something here that gets got, you can retrieve the text and post it somewhere else.

Programming · 2008/09/18 · 43 COMMENTS · Link

Christian Slater: Threat or Menace?

My friend and fellow boobtube connoisseur Jonathan Bourne has posted his Television Death Pool predictions, split into two parts like a very special episode of Blossom. Here's his list, ordered from most to least likely cancellation:

• ER (NBC)
• Life on Mars (ABC)
• My Own Worst Enemy (NBC)
• Do Not Disturb (Fox)
• The Mentalist (CBS)
• 90210 (CW)
• Opportunity Knocks (ABC)
• Knight Rider (NBC)
• Worst Week Ever (NBC)
• Gary Unmarried (CBS)

I'm kicking myself for not picking Do Not Disturb. I watched the sitcom's pilot last week, and I agree with the assessment of Chicago Tribune TV critic Maureen Ryan: "It made my soul vomit."

Bourne and I disagree on My Own Worst Enemy, the new drama that answers the question "whatever happened to Christian Slater?":

One way to try to get viewers to tune in to a program is to put a star in it. But does Christian Slater count as a star? I think Slater's paycheck is this show's worst enemy. Because if this program doesn't get huge ratings right off the bat, the bean counters are going to look at the bottom line and determine that this show is too expensive because of the money they shelled out for Slater.

I'm having trouble with the show's premise -- Slater plays a dull white collar guy in the 'burbs who doesn't realize he's also a bad-ass international spy. How could you not figure out something like that? Wouldn't you wake up one morning in leopard-skin underwear instead of your tighty-whities, smelling of explosives and gunpowder, and wonder what the hell happened the previous night?

But in spite of that, I can't bet against the star of Heathers, the last dark comedy about school violence that's ever likely to be made.

Television · 2008/09/17 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Game Designer Rob Heinsoo Meets Roy G. Biv

Until 2006 I was colorblind. Show me a sunset and I saw shades of green. Hand me a pink shirt and I was sure it was grey. Before my first date with Lisa, my future wife, I gave her my address and described my house as the gray house on the corner. The only gray house on a corner anywhere in the neighborhood belonged to the local drug dealers, which she realized when they opened the door and called inside to see if there was a 'Rob' sprawled somewhere in the haze. Lisa said "Uh, sorry, I've got the wrong house," backed up and found me in the blue house on the corner.

On February 8, 2006, I sat at home typing Dreamblade notes on my laptop computer while Lisa went to hear a National Geographic lecture with her mom. As usual, I had Windows Media Player humming along playing music. I liked having the Alchemy visualizer twirling colors around at the side of the screen while I worked. Suddenly ...

The story makes possible this great oh snap! insult from one of Heinsoo's readers: "If you were still colorblind, you'd have an excuse for using this format for your pages. The color scheme makes me wish I were colorblind."

Gaming · 2008/09/17 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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