Did you know that Quakers introduced ice cream to this country? Ben Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson all ate it. That’s right, ice cream is one of those many all-American things that America stole from someone else and rebranded as our own.

When the 2008 primary season narrowed to two candidates, Dems had a choice between two flavors of premium, handchurned, high-fat-content (16%) ice cream: Chocolate Dream and Valiant Vanilla. Life seemed filled with sweet possibility way back then.

One problem with eating ice cream is that if you're not careful, brain freeze can set in. For some Democrats, brain freeze was prompted very early on by Jesse Jackson Jr. For other Democrats, brain freeze hit like a Mack Truck when Obama caved on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But those events now seem like child’s play compared to the recent global financial meltdown sparked by Wall Street’s stunning failures.

I watched the Obama/McCain debate last night, and this is what I learned: President Obama will “kill bin Laden and crush al-Qaeda.” President McCain will know when to send “America’s most precious asset, American blood, into harm’s way.” After all was said and done, however, I learned something much more profound. Just to be safe, I double-checked the debate transcript to make sure I had heard right.

Obama: “Everybody knows now we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression”; the environment, climate change, and green jobs are “one of the biggest challenges of our times”; we can’t deal with the “climate crisis if our only solution is to use more fossil fuels that create global warming”; “Georgia is on the brink of enormous economic challenges”; we have to do something about the “health care crisis that so many families are facing”; the next commander-in-chief needs to make “sure” he can “see some of the twenty-first-century challenges and anticipate them before they happen”; we have to be “much more strategic if we’re going to be able to deal with all of the challenges that we face out there”; the “nature of the challenges we’re going to face are immense”; and they won’t be the challenges we expect: They will be the challenges we don’t expect.

McCain: American workers are the “innocent bystanders” in the “biggest financial crisis and challenge of our time”; heath care is one of the “really major challenges that America faces”; how the economic crisis affects our peacemaking abilities is “one of the challenges that America faces,” but knowing when America can “beneficially affect the outcome of a crisis” is a challenge; as is Russia; as are the Iranians who “continue on the path to acquiring nuclear weapons.” The “challenges that we face are unprecedented,” and “there are challenges around the world that are new and different.”

As a kid, I attended public schools in Ohio, and they occasionally served ice cream in the school cafeteria. We had a choice between chocolate or vanilla. It came in the form of a small block of deep-frozen dairy product wrapped in paper, or in a small cardboard cup with a difficult-to-yank-off cardboard lid. Either way, we were given a wooden toungue depressor in the shape of a spoon to eat it with. In order to partake of the delicious dessert, we had to chisel off dime-sized pieces of the rock-hard substance, and if those chunks didn’t fly off the spoon onto the floor, we could savor each tiny nugget as it finally melted on our tongues. The trouble was, no matter which flavor you chose, it always tasted like the wooden spoon.

After watching the debate last night, it’s clear to me that the question has changed since the primaries. The question now facing us seems to be: What flavor wooden spoon do we want?

I'd ask you to read this post, but if you try to read it, you'll likely get a message telling you, "The file you are looking for has not been found. Return to the home page." The same message you've gotten for nearly two weeks.


I'd be tempted to ask you to compare the complete and utter failure of this site to accommodate the entirely predictable level of traffic during a historic election season with the government's failed response to Katrina in 2005 during the annual hurricane season, but I can't rely on the server to handle the basic function of loading basic text.

The server can flawlessly load the ads, I've noticed, just not the customers.

Today I commented on several reader blogs, but my comments never appeared due to an Internal Sever Error. Cyberspace ate them. Backspace, refresh, nothing.

The fierce urgency of now has passed. There really is such a thing as being too late. The cafe din has died.

I might have waxed poetic on the ramifications of our dependency on technology and hand-wringing helplessness when it fails, but the steam coming out of my ears clouded my ability to see the computer screen. So I went for a walk.

On my walk I was reminded of a trip to East Germany in 1980. I had stepped into a china shop in Meissen, and much to my ignorant American surprise, the shelves were bare except for a few Blue Onion samples. Back then, no East German could have afforded Meissen porcelain, it was all exported.

I feel like I'm in East Germany again. The TPM shelves are bare, my favorite posters frolicking on more functional sites or pursuing more productive projects, my friends silenced, trolls sprouting like weeds in an abandoned lot.

I'd ask you to share your own frustration and recommend this post, but when you click on Recommend, your vote won't register. Much like what may happen to some of us in November.

Just when giddy Democrats and muddleheaded media magpies expected John McCain to pick the obvious—a Michigan-winning, cardboard-cutout former governor of Massachusetts—McCain picked the least-obvious—the current governor of Alaska. And what a pick! Sarah Palin is smart, fearless, tough, Christian, poised, charming, persistent, undauntable, young, principled, likable, accomplished, and beautiful. Did I mention she’s a woman and energetic mother of five?

 

Even without kids, she’s no slouch. In 2007, Palin went to Kuwait to visit Alaskan troops, cancelled the bridge to nowhere and cut her state’s 100 federal earmarks in half with a goal of whittling them down to a mere dozen:

 

“We really want to skinny it down,” said Karen Rehfeld, Gov. Sarah Palin’s budget chief.

Rehfeld recently wrote a memo to all state commissioners telling them that to “enhance the state’s credibility,” federal earmark requests for money should be only for the most compelling needs.

They should have a strong national purpose, Rehfeld told the commissioners, not just to fill funding gaps in the state budget.

 

Palin has leadership credentials not limited to her home state. She has firsthand experience with education and energy issues, which are transferable to the federal level. And unlike the Bush administration, she seems to believe in the concept of oversight.

 

But the kicker? Palin can shoot a gun.

 

Yesterday, CNN repeatedly showed a video clip of Palin at a shooting range and mingling with American troops. They played it over and over and over and over. And over and over. Wikipedia mentions her early morning moose hunting expeditions with her dad when she was a kid. Articles are already calling her a gun-toting beauty queen. So I started thinking about that image of Palin shooting a gun.

 

Because we all know gun-toting + beauty queen = sexy. Think about Angelina Jolie being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

 

Suddenly, it hit me: McCain is not pandering to disaffected female Hillary voters. If McCain is pandering to anyone, he is pandering to men. I say this because of the TPM posts already calling Sarah Palin a babe. I say this because of the subliminal effect of media images that bombard us. I say this because research shows that if you want to win the presidency, you need to win a majority of the white male vote more than any other demographic. How cunning of the Republicans, therefore, to rile up the distractible Democrats with PUMAs and Paris while secretly selecting a talented all-American female for the second-highest job in the land.

I'll just come out and say it: If Barack Obama loses this election, it will be Hillary Clinton's fault. She does nothing but undermine Barack. She needs to get over herself and get with the program.

Look, he's already got an entire country of racists determined to tear him down. It'll be a miracle if he wins.

He's bending over backwards to accommodate the angry old white women at the convention by allowing Hillary to speak. What more do they want? I mean, what's he supposed to do? Kiss their wrinkly fat asses? They get a whole night to themselves: Call it (Old) Girls Night Out. Okay, okay, that's not funny.

Look. This is a historic election. Do you want to throw away 4 or 8 years plus the Supreme Court plus Roe v. Wade? It's up to you.

Look, just keep your voice down, okay? The neighbors are reading this blog.

Hey, are you doing any laundry tonight? Can you throw in a few things for me while you're at it? All my white shirts are dirty. Thanks.

Mark Halperin actually listed "mystery person" as a choice for the two presidential candidates.

Mystery person!

Hell, my 15-week-old kittens could have told me that.

Oh. It's after 4:00 on a Friday. He must be on his way to the Hamptons for the weekend.

Nice work if you can get it. Meanwhile, I think I have adrenal failure.

"Perhaps we aren't doomed after all" is what Michael Gerson thinks about John McCain's performance at Rick Warren's Saddleback Civic Forum with the presidential candidates. In other words, McCain gives Gerson hope that the Republicans can win the White House in November.

I watched the forum and I've read almost every assessment of it I can get my hands on, from Bill Kristol to Mike Madden to Byron York to Chris Cillizza to Rod Dreher to Stephen Suh to Catholics to gays. I've read about the merits of style and pay grades and character. I've read about which pat answer is the best pat answer, at least to cater to the people whose vote apparently matters more than mine: the almighty evangelical Christian voters. After two faith forums in this election cycle, I've come to some conclusions.

It doesn't matter if McCain ripped off Solzhenitsyn, it doesn't matter if McCain wasn't in a cone of silence, it doesn't matter if McCain offers to go to the mythical gates of hell to get Osama bin Laden. It doesn't matter who lies or who tells the truth.

What matters is that Barack Obama is wasting his time courting voters who will never vote for him.

No sooner does the Pew Research Center publish findings of "Obama fatigue," than in walk the Clintons, as if on cue.
Senator Hillary Clinton is noncommittal about whether she'll pursue a roll-call vote at the Democratic convention in Denver.
And CNN reports that President Bill Clinton will speak at the convention on Wednesday, August 27, the "night of the vice presidential nominee's speech."
Wednesday is also the night of the vote.
UPI reports that President Clinton was personally invited to speak by Senator Obama.
Yet despite the significance of this development, esteemed oracles like Jonathan Alter persist in predicting that Senator Clinton is planning a "Greek drama" for the convention. Sen. Clinton had used the expression herself to mean that the custom of placing one's name in nomination has long existed, but the media's skill in turning her words against her is an occupational reflex.
Alter (among other oracles, like Chuck Todd), has a problem understanding what Bill meant when he said, "You can argue that nobody is ready to be president. . . . You can argue that even if you've been vice president for eight years, that no one can be fully ready for the pressures of the office."
I don't have a problem understanding his statement. If Jimmy Carter or Al Gore had said it, no one would notice. Sen. Obama had nothing but kind words for the former president. And as for Greek dramas at the convention, Obama said, "I think we're looking for energy and excitement."
Excitement, rather than fatigue, appears to be guaranteed.
Now I wish I were going to Denver.

Did you know that talks with Iran to negotiate its nuclear program were taking place in Geneva? I didn't. The talks included France, Britain, China, Russia, Germany, and the U.S. Who knew!

Did you know that in a dramatic about-face, the U.S. actually attended the talks? If you didn't know, don't feel bad, I didn't know this myself. That's why I'm writing about it. Undersecretary of State William Burns joined the meeting with Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili. As far as I've been able to discover, this was our first face-to-face contact with Iran since 1979.


It's not that I don't pay attention to the news. I tend to pay lots of attention if the news involves Iran. But I found out about the meeting after it had already ended, when a friend from Canada e-mailed me a link to the U.S.'s statement to Iran, made today: You have two weeks to suspend uranium enrichment or else.


Two weeks. That's not very much time. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said:

We hope the Iranian people understand that their leaders need to make a choice between cooperation, which would bring benefits to all, and confrontation, which can only lead to further isolation.

Okay, strong rhetoric that translates to even harsher sanctions. Like what, I don't know. But the difference here is twofold: the U.S. formally attended the talks, and now we have backup. In other words, we are progressing toward a goal. Iran seems to think it will take time to reach that goal. I wonder. What I wonder is, do we really have the same goal Iran does? Or are we going through perfunctory motions as we did before we bombed Baghdad? I also wonder why the news of the U.S.'s attendance at the meeting hasn't been a bigger deal to the MSM? That just irritates the crap out of me.

I won't link to all the articles by journalists and others who think we are headed for a military confrontation with Iran. Seymour Hersh, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, and others have voiced their certainty that we will engage with Iran, and I believe them. It gives me lots of anxiety because I do not trust the current administration to be patient. The only one who seems to be a little patient is, surprisingly, Condoleeza Rice.

Now that Obama is overseas, in the middle of the action, what do you think his response is going to be? Do you think his experience there will change his views about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or Israel?

In the meantime, for anyone who wants to do something to protest potential U.S. aggression against Iran, United for Peace & Justice is staging discussions and demonstrations in several states across the country July 19 through July 21. Check out the National Days of Action Against War on Iran Calendar here. I didn't know about these events until today, either, so please rec if you want other people to know about them, too. Thanks.

Last night I watched a great doc called Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. I was spellbound, but Zinn is the type of person who floats my boat anyway. Still, there's plenty I didn't know about him. If you haven't seen this doc, here's a little taste:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehc3V1g5pm0

After I watched the film, I thought about how a generation of old-school activists is dying off. Though Zinn is still very much alive, he turns 86 this year. Not a hell of a lot of time left.
This thought came to me because of all the calls at TPM for muzzling ourselves in response to Obama's resounding failure to lead on the FISA Amendments. I naturally take Zinn's view, which is that now is the perfect time to act up, speak out, protest such an outrageous stance. Speaking out is what democracy is.
But that's me. I may be Obama's age, but I'm an old-school radical in my soul.
Little did I know that while I was having these thoughts about Zinn last night, George Carlin's heart finally failed to continue beating. I didn't learn this news until this morning, but I was struck by the reality of my prediction. See, George Carlin was an old-school activist too. His shit-disturber message and reflex was the same as Zinn's (and mine, I guess), he just packaged it differently. I am in mourning that Carlin is gone.
In tribute to Carlin, here's one of my favorites, his wisdom about America and war:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaS2bRGS86c&feature=related

(Hope I did this right. This is my first post.)