Who Wants to Go to Nebraska?

Sarah Palin spoke to a rally of 5,000 people in Omaha, Nebraska last night:

"The pundits were saying, 'Check out where she's going. She's going to Nebraska.' The pundits were saying, 'The only reason she would be going there is because they're scared. They have to shore up votes.' I so wanted to reach into that TV and say 'no.' I'm going to Nebraska because I want to go to Nebraska."

Here's what a sales guy from Omaha in the audience had to say:

"She talks to us. She's one of us. She doesn't talk down to us like an Ivy League, Harvard person."

LBOTC: We know the real reason Sarah went to Nebraska, and it wasn't to shore up votes in Omaha for a potential tiebreaker in the electoral college like the pundit wonks on TV have been fed. It was to win votes in western Iowa. Omaha is just across the river and the de factor capitol of western Iowa. We noticed that U.S. Congressman Steve King from Iowa's 5th congressional district was in attendance.

Second Thoughts about Sarah Palin

I remember when I was first introduced to Sarah Palin. I had just watched Barack Obama’s convention acceptance speech tuned to Fox on my parent’s TV while visiting in Southwest Iowa. “He’s clearly very well educated, where did he go to school?” my father asked. Looking at the words on all the Obama signs in the Denver stadium crowd, my mother remarked, “That’s a lot of change.” Then John McCain came on, congratulated Barack, and said he had a surprise for us.

The next morning on Fox, the news was all about a plane from Alaska that had landed the previous night in Ohio, where John McCain was to announce his running mate. So we met Sarah. And then we went to visit my 96-year-old grandmother. She had been watching Fox on her new wide-screen TV. “I don’t know,” she said. “It looks like the political parties are going to fool around and get a woman in as President. I don’t think I like that. I can’t explain why.”

70 million people tuned in last Thursday to watch the VP candidate debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, and they didn’t tune in to watch Joe. The debate audience was second only to the 80 million who tuned in back in 1980 to watch Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter debate. That was back when the debates were on all the channels, and you couldn’t switch to watch a movie on AMC. Just 52 million tuned in to watch John McCain and Barack Obama debate the week before last. So, for now at least, Sarah seems to be the star of the show.

Who won the debate? David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register says that Sarah failed to prove her qualifications and shed her image as a lightweight. But he said the same thing about Barack Obama in the first debate. I don’t agree. Here’s how I scored it:

First, I give Sarah and Joe 5 points each for substance. That’s what these debates are supposed to be about, right?

Sarah proved she could handle the pressure. If you tuned in expecting Joe Biden to make her cry, you were disappointed. Well, Joe did choke up at one point, when talking about the car accident that put his two boys in the hospital and took the lives of his daughter and first wife. So does that count as Sarah making Joe cry? Not quite, but I still have to take a point away from Joe.

CNN calculated that Joe was talking at an 8th grade level, while Sarah was talking at a 10th grade level. Note to Obama: you can’t talk much higher than that and expect to get elected in this country, but don’t talk down to us or the country won’t elect you either. In any case, that’s a point for Sarah.

The regional accent, syntax, and vocabulary of Sarah’s sentences would make your high school English teacher dizzy and the Queen of England cringe. Hey, this is America and it’s not the Queen’s English anymore. We Americans are revolutionaries and innovators. That’s another point for Sarah.

For using 10th grade words like “heck” and “doggone” I’ll give Sarah another point.

For telling the African-American moderator Gwen Ifill that she wasn’t going to answer her questions without that sounding the least bit racist or otherwise condescending (see how far we’ve come, I’m guessing that how racist that was never even occurred to you), Sarah gets another point.

Sarah gets a point for best delivery of a pre-planned zinger. At the very beginning of the debate, Sarah turned to Senator Biden and asked, “Hey, can I call you Joe?” And so how many times did she call him Joe? Exactly once, about an hour later, when she turned to Biden and said: “Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again.”

Joe loses a point for beating the drum too hard on John McCain’s statement two weeks ago that the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are strong. Joe, we’re in a banking crisis, you can’t be badmouthing the broader economy. The foreign investors are listening.

Sarah gets a point for most emphatic statement on the financial mess:

“I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars. We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings and we need also to not get ourselves in debt. Let's do what our parents told us before we probably even got that first credit card. Don't live outside of our means.”

I don’t have the credit cards records, but I’m guessing I may now know why Sarah had to change colleges so many times:

Hawaii Pacific University, Honolulu, Hawaii – one semester
North Idaho College, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho - two semesters
University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho - two semesters
Matanuska-Susitna College, Palmer, Alaska - one semester
University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho - three semesters

Actually, here’s what I suspect: Sarah enrolled in a private school in Hawaii she couldn’t afford and had to drop out, then moved in with her grandparents or some aunt or uncle in Idaho to establish state residency and get cheap credits at the nearby community college (best educational value in America), transferred to the flagship state university in Idaho on the in-state tuition plan (that was the plan when she started the community college), went home to Alaska for a another semester of cheap community college credits and to keep her high school boyfriend Todd on the hook, and then went back to Idaho to finish her BS degree in communications-journalism at the big university.

But I digress. For not even being asked to explain her college career and putting her BS degree to good use, I give Sarah another point.

On the question about same-sex marriages, Joe uttered the word “same-sex” 4 times while Sarah avoided saying it at all. That’s another point for Sarah, and Joe loses a point.

Overuse of the word maverick? According to the official transcript, Sarah said the word maverick 6 times but Joe said it 9 times. OK, maybe he said “not maverick”. Still, we have to take the point away from Joe.

Joe also loses a point for getting confused about the U.S. Constitution. Joe, the executive branch is defined in Article II not Article I and the Vice President gets to preside over the Senate all the time, not just when there is a tie.

Joe Biden smiled a lot, but he didn’t have the best smile, so Sarah gets the point for flirting without getting caught. Ok, maybe she did get caught winking at us, but I’m giving her the point anyway. I know she was really winking at me. Heck, make that a doggone two points.

Final score: 15 points for Sarah and 0 points for Joe. SNL is moving to primetime on Thursdays and I have suspected from the beginning that Tina Fey is rooting for Sarah. Too bad for the Republicans she’s only running for Vice President. I’m coming to the conclusion that win or lose in 2008 we’ll see her again at the top of the ticket in 2012 and 2016.

Meanwhile, the financial crisis has sunken John McCain’s chances. He trails 7 points in nationwide polls and even further in electoral vote counts. One projection shows McCain losing to Obama 164 to 364. Another projection shows him losing 194 to 329 with North Carolina tied.

An American Carol Alert

The movie An American Carol opened this weekend. And, because we would never admit we saw it ourselves, we will report that we heard from a friend who heard from a guy he knows that this is one of the worst movies ever made.

Substitute the Fourth of July for Christmas and left wing filmmaker Michael Moore for Scrooge and you have the plot. It’s being billed as the first right wing comedy. There may not be a second.

It was written, directed, and produced by David Zucker, who did Airplane!, the Naked Gun series, and the Scary Movie series. There were (we are told) a few funny gags, although you’ve probably seen them all in the previews and ads. And the cast list showed such promise:

Kevin Farley as Michael Malone – Chris Farley’s brother is dead on as documentary filmmaker Michael Moore but do you want to watch that for 90 minutes?
Kelsey Grammer as General George S. Patton –You’ll want to slap him.
Jon Voight as General George Washington – Suspect for this atrocity Angelina Jolie won’t be letting him see his grandkids at Thanksgiving.
Trace Adkins as Himself/The Spirit of Christmas Future aka The Angel of Death – the country folk aren’t going to forgive shelling out their money to see this.
James Woods as Michael's Agent – Wasn’t he in Oliver Stone’s Nixon? We smell a conspiracy.
Paris Hilton as Herself - What is she doing in this movie? Wasn’t McCain just slamming her? We smell a rat.
Simon Rex as Himself – This is what comes from hanging out with Pairs Hilton.
Kevin Sorbo as George Mulrooney - Hercules spoofs George Clooney.
Dennis Hopper as The Judge – He shoots zombie ACLU lawyers with a shotgun. This is a long way from Easy Rider.
Chriss Anglin as John F. Kennedy – Turns out he was a warmonger in this history.
Robert Davi as Aziz - He was great in the series The Profiler but remember he was also in Showgirls.
Leslie Nielsen as Himself / Grampa - Collects his pension check here.
Jillian Murray as Heather – Not pretty enough to be this movie’s only redeeming quality.
Bill O'Reilly as Himself – He’s funnier on his TV show.
Gary Coleman as Slave - He must owe somebody money.
David Alan Grier as Slave – He is better than this, he must owe somebody a lot of money.
Benton Jennings as Hitler – Yet another singing Hitler.

When You Die, You'll Regret the Things You Didn't Do

We screened the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross at the office on Friday afternoon (how cool is that?).



It's odd seeing an office without computers, sales leads typed on index cards, and pay telephones. And what a deal, 6 lots in an Arizona development for $82,000. Do you have any idea what that would be worth today?

The Office Poll

We took a poll at our office in Harvard Square this Friday. Here are the results.

14 Obama
10 McCain
1 Nader

Although the support for McCain seems surprisingly strong for Cambridge, Massachusetts, these are roughly in line with the current poll results for Massachusetts.

Seeing John Malkovich

I got by hair cut Friday at the Custom Barbership, which is located in a little half-width space on Brattle Street. After paying, I stepped out of the tiny door and almost ran into a passerby, a balding man in his 50s wearing a jean jacket. He gave me an angry look that stopped me in my tracks and was so piercing you could see the world through his eyes. He looked familiar, and as he walked away I realized it was John Malkovich.

Who is John Malkovich? Just one of the great American actors of the 20th century. He was in that jewel thief movie, for example. And that one set in France with Glenn Close and Michelle Pfeiffer, that Jenry James novel one with Nicole Kidman and Barara Hershey, that disturbing self-referential one with Cameron Diaz, and that one last year with Angelina Jolie and Robin Wright Penn. But my favorite is Making Mr. Right with Ann Magnuson, Glenne Headley, and Laurie Metcalf.

From Being John Malkovich: There is truth, and there are lies, and art always tells the truth, even when it's lying.

Battle of the Petulant All-Stars

Bill O'Reilly asks Representative Barney Franks (D-Mass) to take a little responsibility for the bailout mess:

For better quality video, you can also watch this on Fox News.

Barney Frank does have an inconvenient history of supporting Fannie and Freddie, the two government sponsored companies whose financial failure is at the center the of the home mortgage lending crisis.

Barney Frank at House Financial Services Committee hearing, Sept. 10, 2003:

“The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and withstand some of the disaster scenarios.”

Barney Frank at House Financial Services Committee hearing, Sept. 25, 2003:

“I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.”

Barney Frank at House Financial Services Committee hearing, Sept. 25, 2003:

Frank: Let me ask [George] Gould and [Franklin] Raines on behalf of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, do you feel that over the past years you have been substantially under-regulated?

Mr. Raines?

Raines: No, sir.

Frank: Mr. Gould?

Gould: No, sir. . . .

Frank: OK. Then I am not entirely sure why we are here. . . .I believe there has been more alarm raised about potential unsafety and unsoundness than, in fact, exists.

Barney Frank was interviewed on CNBC about Freddie and Fannie on July 14, 2008:

“I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They're not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward. They're in a housing market. I do think their prospects going forward are very solid. And in fact, we're going to do some things that are going to improve them.”

Fannie and Freddie were seized by the federal government on September 8, 2008.