Sarah Palin = Harriet Miers

It's pronounced Pay-lin, by the way. Also, Nevada is pronounced Nev-aah-da, not Nev-ahh-da. It rhymes with cat or vat. I had to be told that recently, as I am inexplicably the AFL-CIO Voter Protection Coordinator for Nev-aah-dah.

Back to bizness: My theory about the Palin pick is that it just demonstrates what low regard for the vice presidency McCain has, and how little he understands the office. While its true that it has been traditionally under-utilized, one cannot argue that Cheney leaves it a ceremonial position. McCain should know that, but doesn't. Instead, he has joked that the VP attends funerals and checks up on the health of the POTUS every day. Palin has an equally dim view of the job, asking What does the VP even do, anyway?

I've been wondering whether I should feel bad for criticizing Palin for going back to work 3 days after her son was born. In my heart, I think its a terrible thing to do to a child, and to do to one's self. Take a freakin' break, lady, you just had a baby. Even the easy ones are tough for the first week or two, for godsake. But maybe, my feminist demon-on-the-shoulder says, some women don't want to be home with their baby, and believe that whoever is home - dad, gramma, auntie, nanny - is a more caring option. And in those cases, it's probably true. If you don't want to be home with your child, then its good when you leave that child with someone you trust to love him. I feel that. But do Republicans? Does Anne Coulter? It's just bizarre to me.

Here's a theory I had briefly considered: Palin is not expected to last as the VP nominee. (I also wonder if there's a mechanism in the RNC by-laws to refuse to accept the nominee's VP pick). To quote rwallnerny:

What if next Tuesday or Wednesday, after Palin gets beat up by the press a bit (which they will, the press *hates* candidates being put up for national office which they haven't brutally vetted first), she comes out to the podium and tearfully "announces" that she is declining the nomination for vp to spend more time with her five month old baby. McCain accepts her resignation the ticket, says he was proud to have picked a woman, and then picks Romney as her replacement.

The reason he'd do this, is to steal the spotlight from Obama after The Speech but still get the actually presidential-ish Romney on the ticket.

Come on. Every long weekend needs a conspiracy theory.

And even if it wasn't planned that way, it might work out that way. Palin may shape up to be the next Harriet Miers.

UPDATE: The reason I didn't do a straightforward compare and contrast on these two is that they are actually polar opposites. Harriet Miers had decades of service to Republicans but was viewed as suspect and insufficiently doctrinaire. Palin has like 10 minutes of public service as a throw-the-bums-out Repub and she's a darling of the grassroots because she didn't abort a baby with Down's. Huh? While its true Harriet Miers didn't have the chops to be a Supreme Court justice, she's certainly better qualified than Palin to be the VP. So I am hereby starting a Facebook group: Harriet Miers for Vice Presidential Nominee.

We're In The Money

Well, probably not me and mine.

Calculate your Obama tax cut.

what the ...?

Did you know that Sarah Palin’s kids are named Bristol, Piper, Track, Trig, and Willow? And that she went back to work three days after her baby was born in April? And that he was born with Down’s Syndrome? Is her vagina made of steel? Or is her heart made of stone?

My favorite part about the Democrats’ glee is that the fact that they are calling her Geraldine Quayle.

What Does McCain Believe?

And I don't mean that in the flip-flop sense that everyone's been asking. Reading this interview he did with Time magazine certainly leaves me with the impression that McCain believes . . . he's going to lose.

Another Promise

On to my next topic. The babe dad. What's that you ask? First of all, its Mr. Scobie. Yeah yeah yeah. This isn't a love post about him. Its a post about the fact that all the dads on the block have started exercising. The central activity is Monday night basketball. Pretty much all of them go as often as they can. Which is cool. But recently, they've each individually started working out. Not all of them. But Mr. Scobie is running regularly with another dad from up the street, who has lost weight. Another dad has been doing boot camp for 2 months and has lost some weight. That's 43% of the dads! And another one already worked out regularly. They are shaping up to be an in-shape crew.

So what's really going on on Monday nights? My hubs comes back from "the gym" pretty sweaty but there's more than one way to make a guy sweat. I briefly considered that there was a collaborative effort to conceal numerous affairs, but frankly that doesn't seem like its this crew's style. That leaves two other plausible explanations (I mean, they can't all be gay, right?): They want to look good for their wives, or they want to look good for eachother, on the basketball court. As pleased as all the wives surely are, I think the latter explanation is the more likely.

And here's the conundrum: The wives have no similar incentive to start working out for eachother. Which leaves us with the incentive of working out for ourselves or for our husbands. And since our husbands are working out for eachother, that won't get us out of bed at 5:45 to go running.

I Am A Promise Keeper

But not in a creepy way. I am just returning to blog posts long promised, that's all.

While we were on vacation at the loveliest beach house I've ever been allowed to enter, I actually got to read a couple of books. I read Gang Leader for A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh and I read Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, by Warren St. John. Good books both but I preferred Rammer Jammer. Which is hard to admit, since its about a topic I hate nearly more than any other: college football. It's not quite as good as Moneyball, which actually caused me to become a baseball fan, but it made me a fan of fans. At least Bama fans. But maybe I was already a fan of those folks.

Gang Leader, on the other hand, did not make me a fan of sociologists. I had hoped it would be a Wire-esque expose of leadership of a drug organization, but it was really more about the central conflict of sociology. Should it be more centered on statistics and scientific methods, which are very poor at capturing "true" or "real" stories of people (in this case poor people), or should it rely on ethnography, where the sociologist "lives among" his subjects to fully appreciate their way of life?

The biggest problem, made very clear by this book, is the so-called Heiseberg principle effect on the research. Venkatesh is aware of the problem. He relates several instances where his subject misuse him, sometimes while simultaneously warning him that he might be used, and the uncertainty that introduces into his research. But he relates it all in this faux naif voice, as though it never occurred to him that the problems he encounters or witnesses existed. To paraphrase (and mock) one particular example, he'd say something like, "What did I know? I was just a middle class Indian kid from Southern California. I didn't realize ghettos were considered dangerous." In an effort to avoid sounding like an academic (he teaches at Columbia), he comes across like Gomer Pyle.

Good Stuff

A new blog for the list to our right: Cake Wrecks. Freakin' awesome.

Completely Random

When I get old, I promise I will not wear:

1. Red hats
2. Anything purple
3. drawstring pants, except to bed
4. asymmetrical earrings

Imagine yourself in a Maoist Propaganda Poster.

Which brings me to a promised topic: Tom Frank's The Wrecking Crew. I will admit that I have not finished this book, but I have read enough to get the flavor. Its an incredibly well-researched book, and it well makes the case (to this already persuaded reader), that conservatives have set out to destroy government and line their pockets while doing it. Definitely worth a read if you have let your blood pressure settle to a healthy level and find that unacceptable.

Mr. Scobie and I had the pleasure of seeing Tom at a dinner hosted by a local bookstore, where he gave a great summary of the book. Once I started the book, I felt like I were listening to Tom, but without the levity of his personal charm. That makes the book slightly disappointing- not in its subject matter, but in the inherent charmlessness of the polemic form. Anyway, it was good to see Tom, and he in particular noted that he thought JFB was a great guy, and was happy to hear we still see him. At one point in the distant past, JFB declared, "Tom Frank wouldn't last a second in sixth century China. The Tang dynasty would kick his ass." Technically, the Sui dynasty ruled China in the sixth century, but JFB was drunk, and so Tommy has long since forgiven him. Tom probably would have been fine during the Sui dynasty, right?

UPDATE: Tom has a good column in the Wall Street Journal today.

Home Run

Michelle Obama knocks it out of the park:

Back From Vacation

And I have a lot to blog about. But a melange of not-quite-alcoholic-enough beverages leaves me verbose enough to blog but not enough to say anything. So I will do a 5-words-or-less summary of my major topics:

1. Vacation: Hella relaxing.
2. Joe Biden: Good choice, you'll see.
3. Denver convention: What's to protest?
4. Georgia: Cold War Deux, I'm psyched.
5. Weight Gain: Not cool.
6. Exercise: Also not cool.

Topics about which I will blog more this week:
1. Tom Frank and The Wrecking Crew
2. Obama and the drug war
3. My job
4. Books I have read
5. The conundrum of the "babe dad"

Summer's almost over, folks. I think it says in Ecclesiastes that there's a time to sow, a time to reap and a time for the fields to lay fallow. If its not in the Bible, it should be. Well, the fallow time is behind us, and its time to either reap or sow, depending on how you construe this metaphor, blog-wise. Readers, read. Bloggers, blog. That's the way nature intends it.

Celebrity Look-alike 1.5

"Anonymous", a neighbor of mine, reminded me, as he borrowed our weed whacker, that he has occasionally compared me to Tina Fey. I would slot her in between Rossellini and Evangelista, although she's probably the most accurate celebrity comparison. So accurate that I can't even think of anything funny to say about it.

Celebrity Look-alike 2.5

From Kate: "I just stopped by St Scobie's Outpost and I cannot believe that Ralph Macchio is not on that list. You were 12, you wore red & black exclusively, you had short hair, the movie was huge. I remember noticing this resemblance and soon after someone remarking about it to you, and you said, 'Cool'."

'Tis true, except my buffalo check days were around age 10. So, hovering around Albert on my celebrity likeness meter is Daniel-sen. That's totally me.

More Celebre-Me

I have a Kevin Bacon rating of 3. What's yours? Check with the Oracle of Bacon. You enter someone who you personally know that's even minimally famous, and it hooks you up. I did Ira Glass (former employer) and David Grohl (he was once in my kitchen at the Schloss*), and they are each only 2 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

* The Schloss is actually called the Plutoschloss, and I had a very involved dream about it last night. For my non-Hyde Park readers, the Schloss was the house I lived in with the Rocker and the Day Trader, and from where my undies disappeared and re-appeared behind the toilet. Remember that story? Anyway. I can't really remember the dream well enough. Plus who really wants this to be a Dream Blog? Not me, for one.

While We Are On the Topic of Celebrities

I saw a picture today of a comedian I really used to like, and remembered that I was once likened to him. That got me thinking about other celebrities I have been compared to. From best to worst:

1. Isabella Rossellini: In the dark days of my pre-teen years, when I self-destructively wore a side-tail and many many grotty friendship bracelets, an old friend of my mother's told me that I looked like Rossellini. It was intended to make me feel better about myself at a time when that was impossible. It did help in the long run, I think. At the time, it didn't work to improve my self-esteem, but I think it shortened the time it took over all for me to eventually develop better self-esteem. If that makes any sense.

2. Linda Evangelista: A girl in my high school class kept pictures of models on her locker door, and one day, she yelled out to me, "Hey, you look like her. At least, your nose does." She was pointing at a picture of Evangelista. Having developed some self-esteem by that point, I decided to take this as a compliment, and not the wierd dig at my nose she probably intended.

3. Albert from Little House on the Prairie: Certain people who will recognize themselves without me having to describe them once told me that I looked like Albert from Little House. My healthy self-esteem has decided to say that this was solely because of the haircut Albert and I shared, and I would prefer that no one disabuse me of this notion.

4. Emo Phillips: There was another girl I went to high school with who was in a school play at our "brother school". When my boyfriend at the time told her that he and I were dating (or whatever), she said, "You mean the girl that looks like Emo Phillips?" The boyfriend, sort of to his credit, I guess, said, "I think Emo Phillips is hot." He also told me that he saw her changing in dress rehearsal and that her nipples were as big as pancakes. So now you have that image in your head too.

100 points to Paris

See you at the debate, bitches.

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

Gobama!

First there was will.i.am, then Ludicris, now Big Boi and Mary J:

The Reach of Nelson Marans

Blogging on my Q from the dentist office's waiting room a few weeks ago, People did a story on couples who have sex every day to improve their marriage. Our old pal Nelson weighs in: "When is there time for meaningful conversation and other requirements of a proper relationship?"
Oh, Nelson.
The couple responds: "It's not like we were locked in a bedroom 24 hours a day!"

Cousin News

I want you to know that my family members are not just famous for their art and dance, they are also entrepreneurs and politicians.

My cousin Malachy has started a T-shirt company. I will add a link when I can find it again.

My mom's cousin Tom is running for Lieutenant Governor of Vermont.

Robert Novak Admits He's a Tool.

Finally, Tool.

More Awesome Then Even The Obama Video

Woman runs sword into foot during Wiccan ritual.