Carpe Datum

Hanging Curveballs

This Has Nothing to Do with This Post,
But I Saw It on Steve Gilliard's Blog
and Just Had To Put It Here for Posterity

Speaking of baseball (that scoreboard is the Yanks worst loss in history, which occured yesterday), I think the Rangers' catastrophic moment happened last night when Minnesota hit a home run to win a game in the bottom of the 11th inning. That puts the Rangers 4 games back in the Wild Card and 4.5 back of Oakland (which has won 13 of 14, and where are all those Moneyball critics nowadays, hmmm?) with more road games against tough teams coming up. I fear they'll be out of it (6+ games back) by the end of the weekend.

I'm not watching the Republican convention. My life is happily very low on stress, which may surprise you given how much I get pissed off about politics and given that we have four kids and two dogs, but it is true. My secret is that I don't go looking for stress. If it finds me, I deal with it, find my "happy place" and make the most of whatever life deals out. Life is too short to dwell on unhappy things when there are so many wonderful things (like my totally kick-ass wife, my crazy kids/dogs, my awesome job, my only-slightly-dysfuntional-but-still-pretty-cool family). This blog helps vent some of that stress that comes from politics, which is part of the reason I started it.

Anyway, the text of the various speeches is all over, and people like Steve Gilliard and Atrios are providing wonderful commentary. My favorite moment so far, the most obvious lie (and let me tell you, it is hard to choose from so many), occured when Ahnold shared a touching memory of watching a debate between "socialist" Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, and that's supposedly when Ahnold decided he was a Republican.

As Randi Rhodes pointed out, uhhh, those two never debated. Not that it matters. I mean, Lord knows when a politician tells a stupid lie, it isn't the media's job to run him or her down and ridicule him for months over it (unless it is Al Gore). It's just funny that with so many lies being told (and I mean really easy to check lies), why isn't that part of the story from the "liberal media"?

By the way, after months of listening to Air America on and off, though not to every show, I have to say that so far, Randi Rhodes is the best. Franken is funny in small doses, but he drones a little bit too much and has too much of an NPR kind of voice to stick with him for three hours. Franken is also a little too polite to really nail people when they lie to him in interviews. He lets people like Ben Stein get away with stupid comments about Democrats that aren't true because Stein has too many practiced one-liners and Al doesn't have time to break every single lie down in a 2-3 minute discussion. Al needs quicker, more incisive talk.

I mean, he's good, and I'm glad he's on the air, but right now, Randi is the one who is the skilled soldier on the front line actually making things happen. She's the one the bad guys are afraid of when they see her coming. Al is kind of the general way behind the lines who meets with the enemy over tea and talks about terms of surrender while the enemy is busy butchering prisoners of war. Randi is the one who busts into the prison camp, lobs a couple of well-placed grenades, shoots up the bad guys and then stands by while the officers tour it later and declare victory.

I haven't listened to enough of the nighttime show (Majority Report) to have an opinion, but I haven't heard too many good things along the lines of why I like Randi. They're ok to listen to, but I want someone to get really mad and call people liars and then back it up with quick, precise and devastating points. Randi does this 5-10 times an hour whereas with the others, you get a good riff maybe once an hour. Randi is much more polished, not necessarily better informed. All of the shows will obviously get better with time (after all, even monsters like Rush were really embarrassing when they started out on radio). I hope they get a chance to.

Posted by Observer at September 1, 2004 04:00 PM