When AIM on Gchat goes bad

Dave 1:19: I just had the best interaction I’ve ever had with Comcast
Ben 1:19: (Autoreply) Is there anything dumber than rickrolling?
Dave 1:20: someone told me what that was yesterday
Ben 1:20: (Autoreply) Is there anything dumber than rickrolling?
Dave 1:20: and I couldn’t help but think: “that’s fucking dumb as shit”
Ben 1:20: (Autoreply) Is there anything dumber than rickrolling?
Dave 1:20: I don’t know, is there?
Ben 1:20: (Autoreply) Is there anything dumber than rickrolling?
Dave 1:20: I really don’t think so…maybe you should ask me again
Ben 1:20: (Autoreply) Is there anything dumber than rickrolling?
Dave 1:20: Ooooh, now that you’ve asked a 6th time…I’m starting to reconsider – why not a 7th…
Ben 1:20: (Autoreply) Is there anything dumber than rickrolling?
Dave 1:21: Yeah, still really dumb. You can stop asking me now.
Ben 1:21: (Autoreply) Is there anything dumber than rickrolling?
Dave 1:21: Fuck, I said stop asking me, okay. You can ask me anything else, just have it not be about rickrolling, okay?
Ben 1:21: (Autoreply) Is there anything dumber than rickrolling?
Dave 1:21: Goddammit, we’re not friends.
Ben 1:21: (Autoreply) Is there anything dumber than rickrolling?
Dave 1:21: And you persist in asking!
===========
Dave on GChat 1:22: I just had an outrageous amount of fun

Kill me now

McCain, Rice could win New York, says a new poll. Repeat after me: It’s too early. It’s too early. It’s too early.

Boycotting Beijing

German Chancellor Angel Merkel says she will not be attending the Olympics in Beijing this year. The New York Times Magazine has a long feature on the politicization of the 2008 Olympics. This will only get more interesting and more controversial in the lead-up to China’s great Olympic unveiling in a few months.

Impeach Clarence Thomas

Clarence Thomas, the AP reports, hasn’t spoken during a Supreme Court case in two years. That’s 142 cases of Constitutional importance, and Thomas just sits there silently.

Why is this guy still on the Supreme Court? Once upon a time, judges and justices were impeached — for largely partisan reasons — when they failed to do their jobs. For 16 years, Thomas has utterly failed to do his job. Maybe it’s time to revive that glorious 19th Century of impeachment. I’m all for it.

I had this story posted in my Gmail Chat status message all today, and a few of my friends IM’ed me about it. One said that if she showed up to her job everyday and remained silent, she would get fired. Another told me a dream she had. In this dream, Clarence Thomas was no longer a Supreme Court Justice. Instead, he was Sen. John McCain’s running mate on this fall’s Republican Presidential ticket.

I’ve heard far more unlikely ideas. Think about it; the Supreme Court rids itself of a member with whom Americans are not enamored; George Bush gets to appoint another Justice — an appointment sure to be filibustered into the next Presidential term; and the Republicans get their Conservative running mate to complement their faux-maverick nominee.

Justices heading to the Executive Branch and vice versa would not be a unique situation in American history, and it’s just crazy enough to work.

That doesn’t mean what you think it does

A headline from the New York Post this morning:

I don’t think they really thought that one through. I wonder who the preordained winner will be.

Edwards really the spoiler

As New York City’s Mayor debates his desire to run a third-party presidential campaign, a lot of talk has turned to the idea of a spoiler. Nearly everyone believes Bloomberg, if he can’t or won’t win, would negatively impact the Democrats in their efforts to reclaim the White House.

But let’s step back a step and visit the current primary picture. With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugging it out, John Edwards has slipped to a distant third in the race, and he’s already the spoiler. My politically-minded friends and I are hardcore Obama supporters, and we’ve tossed around the idea of Edwards-as-spoiler since New Hampshire. Today, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann chime in with the exact same opinion.

From the New York Post:

The Democratic nomination for president will likely be decided by the subtle pulls of ego against duty that tug at the conscience of John Edwards. He manifestly can no longer win – but he helps Hillary Clinton if he stays in the race and boosts Barack Obama if he pulls out…

Edwards divides the anti-Clinton vote – and so undermines the prospects for the changes that he so passionately demands in our government. By staying in, he’s helping deliver the nomination to the person whom he has described as the defender of the status quo.

John Edwards, like any politician used to getting his way, probably doesn’t want to hear or think about this. Rather, he wants to be president. But that reality is slipping away, and he’s now polling a distant third in his native South Carolina.

When Edwards loses in South Carolina, he has to ask himself a question: Who would he rather see as President? If the answer is Senator Clinton, then he should stay in the race. If the answer is Senator Obama, he should drop out and throw his support behind Illinois’ junior senator.

The vast majority of people, as Morris and McGann note, who are supporting Edwards are the anti-establishment, anti-Clinton side of the Democratic Party. These people – many in younger demographics – will flock to Obama’s campaign. If Obama is going to pull out an upset nomination over Clinton, he’ll need all the support he can get, and securing Edwards’ support and supporters would go a long way toward achieving that goal. It’s up to Edwards then to do the right thing.

Weekend at Bernie’s III: Hells Kitchen

It started with a dead, two of his friends and an office chair. It ended with my laughing hysterically every time I think about it.

The fun started on Tuesday when two guys were arrested, as Bruce Lambert and Christine Hauser tell us, “after pushing a corpse, seated in an office chair, along the sidewalk to a check-cashing store to cash the dead man’s Social Security check.”

The details are incredible. Virgilio Cintron, 66, died in his Hells Kitchen apartment, and he had an uncashed check for $355 just sitting around. His friends, James P. O’Hare and David J. Dalaia, stuck his body into an office chair and attempted to wheel him around the corner to the check-cashing store. Along the way, they ran into some awestruck passers-by who were “startled by the sight of the body flopping from side to side as the two men tried to prop it up” and a detective eating lunch at Empanada Mama.

But things were going badly before that. As the stories tell us, they only half-heartedly dressed the guy. They couldn’t pull his pants up all the way, and they tried to use a jacket to cover the rest of him. They then left him outside while they attempted to cash the check. I don’t know about you but I frequently roll up to check-cashing stores in my office chair.

On Wednesday, the story got better because the detective, that very same guy enjoying his lunch, chimed in. “At this point, when they approached closer, I saw the body and I said, ‘Well, this is a dead guy,’ ” Detective Travis L. Rapp said. ”

Well, this is a dead guy. Dead-pan, matter-of-fact humor right there. You can’t beat it. “When they dragged his feet, his feet were just very rigid and they were bouncing off the edge of the sidewalk, and I knew right then and there that he was dead,” Rapp elaborated.

Only in New York.

Ignoring the Undecideds

How could the polls be wrong, Larry Johnson asked the morning on TPM Cafe. The answer, of course, is obvious: They weren’t wrong; the media was wrong.

Johnson basically nails the answer:

I don’t know about you, but I am thoroughly pissed off at the lame, unprofessional conduct of the various networks–MSNBC in particular. They knew that the polls had at least 17% undecided. Rather than simply report that there were a significant number of undecided voters and any projections were not reliable, they danced around like crack addicts celebrating the demise of the Clintons. Hillary is too wimpy. Hillary is too stern. Hillary is too manipulative. Hillary is not manipulative enough…

The media are not a friend and they are fickle. They celebrate the Messiah. They welcome him to Jerusalem. And they will crucify his ass in a heartbeat if it gets them ratings. Hillary and John understand this. Obama may have learned a lesson tonight. We will see.

This is, folks, a mediaocracy. Political news and views come with a pre-set filter designed for ratings and advertising dollars. CNN and MSNBC aren’t there to help us understand the political process or to maximize voter participation, and that is a big problem with the American democracy today.

The media won in New Hampshire tonight

As the clock wound down on the primary coverage in New Hampshire tonight and it seemed clear that Hillary Clinton would emerge triumphantly — or at least with the highest percentage of votes — the media picked a comeback trope and stuck with it. All night, CNN, whose own poll had Brack Obama with a 13-percent lead this weekend, played up the Comeback Kid aspect of the Clinton campaign.

But really, they’re only fooling Americans who don’t look to closely. Look at the trends from New Hampshire. Notice anything? As recent as January 2, Senator Clinton had a 12-point lead of her own in New Hampshire. For the most part, that lead evaporated after Senator Obama won the Iowa Caucuses. Even though, however, some polls still had Hillary Clinton in the lead, and for nearly of those polls, tonight’s results — with the independent voters finally picking a campaign — fit well within the acceptable margins of error for the last week’s polls.

Don’t expect CNN to explain that one though. It doesn’t make for compelling political journalism.

Meanwhile, what exactly did Hillary Clinton win? Well, according to CNN’s Website, she won the same number of delegates that Obama won tonight. Wait, what? In my book, considering that the candidates are aiming for a certain number of delegates and not a certain number of individual votes from each primary, that is a tie. Clinton may have captured a few thousand more votes than Obama, but in terms of the end goal, they both ended the night with nine delegates.

Yet again, CNN didn’t explain that.

Furthermore, the number of delegates handed out so far is pathetically slim. Obama has 25; Clinton has 24; Edwards has 18. The superdelegates give the edge to Clinton right now, but that can very easily change. With two small states in the books, there are still 48 others. But that fact certainly didn’t get too much attention tonight either.

For years, people have long after Iowa and New Hampshire as poor representatives of the overall political climate. But the real fault lies in the media. I love seeing high levels of participation, but this politics through the lens of the media. We see the media anoint Hillary Clinton as the “Comeback Gal” even though she was leading up until a week ago in Clinton Territory. We see the media proclaim the end of some candidates based on their showings in small, unrepresentative states. This is no one way to run a Democracy.

As an Obama supporter, I was dismayed to see how tonight turned out, but in the end, he nailed it. His speech was a rousing success. It sounded presidential; it sounded like it came from tonight’s winner; and it was a far, far better speech than the one Hillary Clinton gave a few minutes later. Hopefully, people were listening to the words coming out of Obama’s mouth though more than they were listening to the words spewed forth shortly thereafter by the pundits on CNN. It is, after all, one of the politicians we will be electing this year, and not Anderson Cooper, Soledad O’Brien, Jack Cafferty or anyone else on TV.

Because I needed another blog

Sometimes, I have more things to say than go beyond subways or the Yankees. This is the place for those ramblings.