Poor li'l Emo. . .

Much has been made of John McCain’s new ad campaign, which describes Barack Obama as a “Celebrity” and compares him to Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears.  Barack himself chose to address this campaign, albeit tangentially, in MO today.  Josh Marshall and a host of Liberal bloggers have picked up on this new gambit as a means to a white girls/black guys scare tactic ala the attacks on Harold Ford.  And since the media is showing McCain’s ads more than McCain is, I guess there’s no harm in linking to it here:

So, perhaps I lack nuance.  But really, even if what they intended to do was paint Obama as a nigga with a taste for white ass, is that what they’ve accomplished?  I never thought about this ad like that even once.  My impression was: “are we voting for President of the United States or of the Death Cab for Cutie Fan Club?”

Because this ad is the pissing-est, moaning-est, most emasculated pile of crap I’ve ever seen in a presidential election cycle.  It’s not “withering” as someone recently described the ad, if by withering you mean damaging to Obama; it is as though they video taped John McCain’s balls shrinking into infinity.  If the best defense you can come up with against a popular figure is, “oh, he’s sooooo popular!  Why don’t you just marry him?”  you should probably pack your Depends and call it a day.

And to follow this gelding display with a lame “tax and spend liberal” line, as though you didn’t notice the entire tenor of this campaign is better than that, just makes things worse.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a specific and significant strain of anti-elite, anti-celebrity sentiment that, when properly tapped into, can be the death-knell of any successful campaign.  There is a way to cut into a candidate by making him look like the “popular” kid everybody hated in school.  Or the rich kid.  John Kerry and para-sailing come to mind.

But this ain’t it.  This is just pathetic.

The sun shines
And people forget
The spray flies as the speedboat glides
And people forget
Forget they’re hiding
The girls smile
And people forget
The snow packs as the skier tracks
And people forget
Forget they’re hiding.

Behind an eminence front
Eminence front - It’s a put on.

Come on join the party
Dress to kill
Won’t you come and join the party
Dress to kill.

The drinks flow
People forget
That big wheel spins, the hair thins
People forget
Forget they’re hiding
The news slows
People forget
The shares crash, hopes are dashed
People forget
Forget they’re hiding.

Behind an eminence front
Eminence front - it’s a put on
Come on join the party dress to
Come on join the party dress to
Come on join the party dress to
Come on join the party dress to kill
Dress yourself, dressed to kill.

I’ve read somewhere that Barack Obama is getting three times the press that John McCain is getting, but that the overwhelming majority of that is negative.  Well, with those kind of numbers, maintaining such a pace requires the occasional puff piece or three.

Witness this from the Washington Post.  It seems Ludacris has written a new song which is offensive.  Whoa.  And it makes fun of Hillary Clinton and John McCain.  So why is this controversial?  Because he says that he’s Barack’s favourite rapper, because Obama said he has some Ludacris stuff on his iPod.

Black presidential candidate; rapper.  Paging James Lawrence. . . .

I’m a huge fan and regular reader of some of the most banal crap on the Internet.  That’s what makes me the blogger I am.  And one of those favourite sites to visit - in fact, top of the list - is Engrish.com.  This post by some dude on some random blog includes a bunch of great ones from the past.  Enjoy.

There’s a new blogger in town, here in DFE land, and his name is Jamie Piazza.  His first post is an interesting republication of an article about the legendary gods of Goth, The Cure, and the controversy surrounding their song Killing an Arab. How timely in so many ways!  Maybe it’s a good thing to remember that anti-Arab hate is not a new or original thing, born solely of a misplaced anger over 911.

Go check him out and say hello!

James Dobson declared not long ago that if John McCain became the nominee to the Republican Party’s nominee to the presidency, he would seeka third party candidate to run instead.  Guess where that declaration went to?

So, you can imagine the thunder, shock and awe when Evangelicals pronounce Mitt Romney unfit for the vice presidency, threatening to remove their troops from the field in the event he gets the nod.  This is one even John McCain can’t fuck up.

I shouldn’t make light of this situation at all, the title of this post just came to me.

Haitians are going through convulsions as a result of the food and fuel shortages and rising prices across the globe in a way very few of us here realize.  Their prime minister’s position has already been toppled; their food prices have jumped 80% in a year; the food provided as relief by the U.N. is running out.

And now, they’re eating mud cakes.  It’s a revolution and a humanitarian crisis, right on our doorstep, folks.

Former Google executives and web gurus have gotten together - along with 33 million dollars in venture capital - to launch a new rival to the Google search engine, Cuil (pronounced “cool”).  Among it’s many boasts is that it contains three times the index, the total number of pages searched by the engine, as Google.

That might seem impressive at first, until you consider the fact that Google specifically banned a number of websites owing to the fact that they were either blackhat SEO honey pots or copyright infringers.  Take for example this search for “dragonflyeye,” Safe Search on, Safe Search off.  Neither yeilds the domain which bears the name.  There is, however, a ClaimID account I haven’t used in three years, some spam blogs and a bunch of comments I’ve made at PHP.net.  None of this is accurate to what one might expect to find when searching for my domain name.

So, they’ve got some room to grow.  It would be nice to have another competitor in the search engine market that provides something a little different, but relevant keyword searching is relevant keyword searching, and Google seems to have it down.  I do like the basic layout of Cuil and if they improve their back end, they might really have something.  Time will tell.

We have a squirrel in our wood burning stove.  Details on the half hour.

Did anyone even know there was such a thing as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization?  I certainly didn’t.  It seems the Organization is yet another multi-national pacts, though this one is less like the EU and more like NATO.

Well, it turns out that this group includes China (duh), Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.  Nations looking to join this group include our buddies Iran and Pakistan.  The admission or denial of these states is at least one item on the agenda for their current meeting, happening right now.  There are concerns, as one might expect, about the United States’ response to adding those members in what is at least on paper an alliance of military proportions.

It might be illuminating, when viewing world affairs, to keep this coalition in mind.  For a start, it’s worth considering the fact that neither Iran nor Pakistan feels compelled to join in any similar coaltions with Middle Eastern nations. . .  because of course, they are ethnically and historically separate regions.