My New Favorite Quote of the Campaign

In the Libertarian Reason Magazine by David Weigel:

McCain's goading Obama to make this trip stands tall and proud as one of the dumbest blunders of the campaign. He couldn't have helped the Democrat more if he'd challenged him to a slam dunk contest.

Biden

Here's the interview that brought me over to the Biden for VP camp. I love his tough-minded approach.

Joe Biden for Vice President

Get over it!

Michael Kinsley takes the Clinton "dead-enders" apart with his usual incisive wit in this week's Time Magazine. Here are the consequences of their pique if it means the Democrats are split and McCain wins:

But there is no easy way these folks can vent their anger at Chris Matthews. So they are taking their revenge on people without health care, women who need abortions, and others who they (if they supported Hillary) must think will be harmed by a Republican victory in the fall. That'll show 'em.

Please, God, don't let us do it again.

John Templeton

One of my fascinations is the relationship between science and religion. I reject the view that the two approaches to knowledge are incompatible - or even contradictory. Billionaire John Templeton established a foundation to explore these issues. He died last week at age 95. There's a great post on Templeton on a Washington Post blog I just discovered called On Faith. Here's a revealing quote from Templeton. Humility is a truly lost quality in our current culture.

"I grew up as a Presbyterian," he told Business Week in 2005. "Presbyterians thought the Methodists were wrong. Catholics thought all Protestants were wrong. The Jews thought the Christians were wrong. So what I am financing is humility. I want people to realize you shouldn't think you know it all.

I wonder where he is right now?

McCain's Economic Team

Think about the previous post on McCain's management style. Now, factor in this insight from David Corn regarding Phil Gramm's "foot in mouth" moment and imagine the internal turmoil that we could expect in a McCain Administration.

So the joke runs deeper than McCain claiming that a man who literally speaks for him doesn't speak for him. It shows there's policy chaos in McCainland. After all, here's a campaign--led by a candidate who once said he didn't know much about the economy--that has one top economic adviser essentially blaming another top economic adviser for economic woes that the second top economic adviser won't acknowledge. Really makes one yearn for a McCain administration, doesn't it?

McCain's Management Style

I love this quote in a post about turmoil in the McCain campaign:

As the former McCain advisor puts it, 'McCain's style is, call everyone into a room, say you guys work it out, and then turn off the lights. And then throw in a knife.' The question going forward for Murphy -- or anyone, for that matter, who wants to run the McCain campaign -- seems to be whether he can grab that knife before somebody else does.

Scalia's Hypocrisy

E. J. Dionne is peerless in finding hypocrisy in our current Supreme Court. Here he focuses on the gun rights decision and nails the contradictions in "originalist" Scalia's ruling. Shameless.

But I also hope this decision opens people's eyes to the fact that judicial activism is now a habit of the right, not the left, and that "originalism" is too often a sophisticated cover for ideological decision-making by conservative judges.

Riverdance

As often happens when I blog while traveling, the trip ended before my blogging ended. So, I'll try to catch up quickly.

After traveling back from Galway, we re-entered the warm bosom of the Saunders household in Dublin on Saturday. John had arranged for us to see Riverdance that evening. He warned us that the best he could get were some "obstructed view" seats. Right. Turns out we were in the Presidential Box, right next to the stage. There was about 15% of the stage that we couldn't see, but the proximity was extraordinary, as you'll see from the following clip. It's a bit long and I had some "buffering issues" when I played it. But gives a good sense of the show.

As it happens, John and Jean Saunders are very close friends with the creators of Riverdance. The producer, Moya Doherty, worked with Jean many years ago and they've remained close. John's contribution to Riverdance was apparently his comment when the idea was presented to him, "Nobody's going to want to set for two hours watching Irish dancing." The rest, as they say, is history.

Here's the clip. The occasion clapping shadows are my wife, Rita, and daughter, Bridget.