Here’s a great Slowpoke strip from 2006 that is painfully relevant today.

Fantastic post on terrorism, which opens with a band-beating metaphor:

I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

So, so good. Read now.

This one might be the graphic of the year for me. National Geographic has a brilliant visualization of healthcare spending, life expectancy, and doctor visits per country. Here’s a taste, but you gotta click through to the full version to find the US on there (the red line below should give you some idea):

Sigh!

Update: Here’s Andrew Gelman’s version.

Jon Stewart on the self-dumb-downing of Gretchen Carlson:

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs his Alexander Hamilton rap (as if sung by Aaron Burr) at the White House Poetry Jam:

The Beast has posted the 2008 edition of their 50 Most Loathsome People In America series. Brutal. “You” have made the list every year:

• 2002 (#3)
• 2004 (#3)
• 2005 (#4)
• 2006 (#16)
• 2007 (#9)

… and finally, 2008 (#43):

Charges: You think it’s your patriotic duty to spend money you don’t have on crap you don’t need. You think Hillary lost because of sexism, when it’s actually because she’s just a bad liar. You think Iraq is better off now than before we invaded, and don’t understand why they’re so ungrateful. You think Tim Russert was a great journalist. You’re hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of piss compared to a Wall Street heist of galactic dimensions, due to a housing crash you somehow have blamed on minorities. It took you six years to figure out what a tool Bush is, but you think Obama will make it all better. You deem it hunky dory that we conduct national policy debates via 8-second clips from “The View.” You think God zapped humans into existence a few thousand years ago, although your appendix and wisdom teeth disagree. You like watching vicious assholes insult each other on TV. You support gun rights, because firing one gives you a chubby. You cuddle falsehoods and resent enlightenment. You think the fact that 43% of whites could stomach voting for an incredibly charismatic and eloquent light-skinned black guy who was raised by white people means racism is over. You think progressive taxation is socialism. 1 in 100 of you are in jail, and you think it should be more. You are shallow, inconsiderate, afraid, brand-conscious, sedentary, and totally self-obsessed. You are American.

Exhibit A: You’re more upset by Miley Cyrus’s glamour shots than the fact that you are a grown adult who is upset about Miley Cyrus.

Sentence: Invaded and occupied by Canada; all military units busy overseas without enough fuel to get back.

Still, 3, 3, 4, 16, 9, 43. I guess “you” (and I) had a good year.

Great: Why I’m Happy, Why I’m Not Satisfied.

So moving. Who knows what the coming months and years will bring, but I was thrilled to witness this, and to be able to put my political cynicism aside for the day. Three other notes:

• Joseph Lowery kicked Rick Warren’s ass (stole the show, really).
• Dick Cheney in the wheelchair! Aside from the obvious symbolism of the decrepit and tired exiting the stage, there’s the fact that he now physically embodies the Bond villain he has always been (or, even better, the HH take).
• How ‘bout that kid in the front pew in Chicago? Asleep the first time we cut to that location, and struggling to stay asleep the next time. Awesome.

The Onion: Supreme Court Overturns Bush v. Gore

Al Franken is closing the gap in MN, he may even be ahead. With this back on my radar, it reminds me of this great MPR series on challenged ballots. Not to pick on Franken (I hope he wins), but check this one out:

The Franken campaign challenged this ballot. Even though the voter filled in the bubble next to Barkley’s name, a Franken representative said what appear to be eraser marks over Franken’s bubble indicated the voter intended to vote for Franken. (MPR Photo/Curtis Gilbert)

That one might be the most egregious, but there’s plenty of shame to go around.

The Onion rises to the occasion, as usual: Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress, Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job, and Kobe Bryant Scores 25 In Holy Shit We Elected A Black President, are all gems. Is that last one the first ever Onion piece that is more touching than funny?

Like in '04, Mark Newman's fantastic maps remind us that our country is purple, not red and blue.

Two cartoons: one from Patrick Moberg and the other from Toles.

Reactions From Around the World.

I'm definitely going to print out and read this seven-part saga from Newsweek once all the chapters are posted. An "in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day."

If there's a wet blanket in all this, it's California, with its five million bigots. Discouraging. I think, as a MA resident, I'll drive over there and demand they hand over the "Most Progressive State" championship belt they've held for so long. Great post from Andrew Sullivan. Also, Toles again.

Update #1: Ze Frank's from 52 to 48 with love (about).

Wow, I thought The Onion was for laughs, not dead-on predictions. From 2001: Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'. Spooky. Via Waxy.

It will be nice to have a president (with any luck) who reads.

And, to get off of politics, I'm sure this is old news by now, but I just saw this today, and I can't stop watching and smiling: Where the Hell is Matt?

Cass Sunstein @ The Chicago Tribune: The Obama I Know.

Disgustingly unsurprising White House waterboarding stance. If you didn't read it the first time I posted it, now would be a good time to read this account from a guy who waterboard himself.

From The New Yorker, Deal Sweeteners:

What's stopping the U.S. from doing the same [distilling better ethanol from sugarcane rather than corn]? In a word, politics. The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it's not cost-effective to use it for ethanol. And the tariffs and quotas for imported sugar mean that no one can afford to import foreign sugar and turn it into ethanol, the way that oil refiners import crude from the Middle East to make gasoline. Americans now import eighty per cent less sugar than they did thirty years ago. So the prospects for a domestic-sugar ethanol industry are dim at best.

Interesting. And, like so many interesting things involving politics and special interests, depressing.

Our Insulated Congress: We don't live in a very democratic democracy, do we?

You really have to watch Colbert dismantle Congressman Lynn "Bag of Hammers" Westmoreland.

On 9/10 and 9/11 ABC will air a docudrama called The Path to 9/11. In it you will "learn" that the CIA had bin Laden in a house, literally surrounded, called the White House for authorization to take him out, and the Clinton administration refused to grant the authorization. Complete fabrication, "Straight Out of Disney and Fantasyland." I wouldn't expect anything factual from something labelled a "docudrama", but c'mon...

After a few weeks of receiving the paper version of The New Yorker (rather than the limited online content) I can see why a buddy of mine found my not subscribing inexcusable. Fantastic. Each issue always has at least one must-read article in it, and often more than that. Off the newsstand you'd pay over $200 for a year's supply, but you get get it for less than $1/issue delivered. The highlights of the July 3rd issue were an interesting World Cup piece, a fascinating article on hemispherectomies (brain surgery, exactly what you'd guess it is from the word):

I asked him Mike's question, about all that space left by the missing lobes. In the past, [Dr. Ben Carson] said, doctors worried about this and tried to anchor the remaining brain by stitching it to the dura. They would put all kinds of things in the cranial cavity—one surgeon used sterile Ping-Pong balls. But, as Carson did more hemispherectomies, he realized that the brain's own drip of cerebrospinal fluid could adequately fill the cavity. Sometims the remaining brain moves during the weeks following the surgery, but usually by less than an inch. "It doesn't seem to be a problem," he said. Much of Carson's method is intuitive. "You develop a feel for the brain," he said. "Normal brain feels like a very soft boiled egg. A bad brain feels like a mushy apple."

... and a profile of David Addington (Cheney's chief-of-staff):

David Addington is a satisfactory lawyer, [Bruce] Fein said, but a less than satisfactory student of American history, which for a public servant of his influence, matters more. "If you read the Federalist Papers, you can see how rich in history they are," he said. "The Founders really understood the history of what people did with power, going back to Greek and Roman and Biblical times. Our political heritage is to be skeptical of executive power, because, in particular, there was skepticism of King George III. But Cheney and Addington are not students of history. If they were, they'd know that the Founding Fathers would be shocked by what they've done."

The Show, 6/29/06:

A wedge strategy is where you focus on a highly charged issue at the borders of rationality and emotion.

The emotional content of the issue can create a moral conviction that the issue needs to be resolved at any cost.

Tactics that would otherwise be called into question can then be employed to resolve the issue.

This sets precedent for the future use of those tactics in other arenas.

You'll have to watch it for yourself to get the context (not to mention the funny parts of the show).

Twenty-nine percent?! That can't be right. That 50.000001% of the population that voted the dude back into office for a second term couldn't have dwindled that much. I mean, the folks that voted for him two years ago must have been frickin' True Believers. Did 42% of them really just dry up and blow away? If so, why? It's not like the last two years have been any different from the first four years.

Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse...

Depending on your political slant, a "Mommy wants a new president" t-shirt could be perfect. Of course, I guess it's more a gift for the kid than the mom.

Should the Internet have slow lanes and fast lanes, with companies paying to get on the fast lanes? From Why You Should Care About Network Neutrality by Tim Wu:

In trying to figure out who's right, let's forget about the Internet and look at KFC. The fast-food chain discriminates. It has an exclusive deal with Pepsi, and that seems fine to pretty much everyone. Now, let's think about the nation's highways. How would you feel if I-95 announced an exclusive deal with General Motors to provide a special "rush-hour" lane for GM cars only? That seems intuitively wrong. But what, if anything, is the difference between KFC and I-95? And which is a better model for the Internet?