Forgive me for being a little premature, but I don’t see any scenario in which John McCain ends up winning in 2008. He’s done. His campaign donations were pitiful compared to his GOP and Democratic rivals. Of all the people in this race, McCain should be second only to Hillary in terms of an election machine ready to raise money and sell him to the undecideds. McCain has been chomping at the bit to be president ever since his BFF Dubya’s campaign started rumors that his daughter is the love child of a prostitute, yet with 6-7 years to get his plans together and the kind of media recognition that any other candidate would kill for, this early in the race, he should be the one kicking ass while the newcomers struggle to build up their campaigns, not the other way around.

Even worse for Maverick^TM is that his phoniness is on display more and more with each passing day. His whole persona was carefully crafted on the notion that he would use his “straight talk” to speak truth to power, that he alone is tired of the partisan games and the politics of personal destruction and any other cliches he can squeeze in there. But all the heartwarming rhetoric in the world couldn’t stop him from looking like a goon when he took his stroll through Baghdad last week. You can’t be an out-of-touch backer of an unpopular President and a modern-day Mr. Smith who can be counted on to rise above politics. Not only does it run against the script you’ve been writing, but it just makes you look pathetic.

McCain’s campaign seems convinced that it can’t win without kissing some conservative ass, yet each move is just alienating both sides further. Conservative voters have seen through McCain’s centrist act for years, which is why, despite his recent pandering to “the base”, he seems to have gotten so little support thus far in the primary season. And it’s just gonna get worse. The only question in my mind is whether he’ll be wise enough to pull the plug in the next 6 months of if he’ll have to suffer a humiliating defeat before realizing that he can’t be a partisan and a rebel at the same time.

Here’s a longer version of the Geraldo/O’Reilly shouting match that’s been making the rounds :

As my friend Tom pointed out, the most amazing thing about the whole exchange isn’t the spectacle of a couple of jerks who shout for a living doing what they do best (though it is entertaining), but that they’re able to turn their anger off so quickly and praise Fox News. It’s sorta creepy how quickly they drop the “righteous outrage” act.

I’ve begrudgingly become an Apple fan over the last few years, but the Apple TV is a piece of junk. Engadget’s review nails why :

Requirements - When purchasing the Apple TV, the Apple employees were very clear about the requirement for an HDTV.
. . .
The movies and TV shows from the iTunes music store are only VGA (not even DVD resolution), and certainly don’t sport Dolby Digital 5.1. They may look good on your laptop, but up on a massive screen is still just such a far cry from HD.
. . .
Another issue we ran into is the 4GB file limit and 5Mbps bitrate limit for the media it does support. Not even Apple’s own 720p HD trailers (8Mbps) have a low enough bitrate to play. Re-encoding is an option, but besides the perpetual desire not to have to do that, the results are often less than stellar, especially when this low bitrate video is blown up on a nice, big, high resolution HDTV. We kind of missed the point of watching movies in HD if you’ve got a screen full dancing pixels and artifacts. Simply put, if anyone is thinking about buying this to watch HD movies and videos: don’t.

Yet, the Apple TV requires an HDTV? I don’t get it. Why build a device for HD that plays back video at YouTube-levels of quality? Even the demo units at the Apple store have low quality clips from The Incredibles which look like a cheap bootleg. If you want low-quality video, the Wii can play YouTube videos, plus play games, and it’s $50 cheaper.

After posting with Wordpress over at TMW, I started really resenting how damn long it takes to publish or do anything in Movable Type. Now that this open source blogging platform has grown up enough to surpass its proprietary cousins, I’ve made the switch and taken the opportunity to upgrade the design a bit. There’s still some tweaking to do with the CSS (especially in comments and the contact page) and the “About” and “Misc” pages need to be overhauled, so consider this a live beta version of the site. If you notice anything weird or missing, or just want to gripe about the changes, tell me about it in comments.

I’m with John on this one…what the hell?!

Indeed, the big liberal blogs have a formal boycott against linking to TNR because they consider us the enemy on precisely those grounds.

Even if you grant Jonathan Chait’s point that there’s a “formal boycott” against TNR by the big liberal blogs (which, as John pointed out, is hogwash), then could you really blame us? This whole unsupported allegation of a “formal” boycott against TNR is business as usual for a publication that all but declared war on the liberal blogosphere with their made-up scandal from last year regarding the Advertising Liberally blogad group. Throughout the whole ordeal, TNR’s senior editor Jason Zengerle accused the liberal blogging community of a “a sheep-like obedience” to Markos Moulitsas and insisted that we all were “follow[ing] Kos’s orders to stay silent “. As a way of highlighting out his journalistic and ethical superiority to the spineless amateurs in the blog-world, Zengerle supported his claim, in part, through a fake email from a source he’s still protecting. (So, who’s the sheep again?) Considering TNR’s complete lack of respect for the bloggers they think should be linking to them, even if there was a formal policy of not linking to The New Republic (which there isn’t), they would have earned it.

Besides, the real reason I rarely link to The New Republic is because most of their content is locked behind a subscription wall. I’m not going to link to an article that my readers can’t see for themselves. I get emails from TNR all the time advertising articles that sound like they’d be interesting, but not enough to pull out my credit card for the privilege of reading what other sites give away for free. Sorry, TNR, but your writers aren’t that good. If I want to read some interesting political commentary, there’s always Salon, Slate, The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, newspaper editorial pages, various conservative publications and a million or so blogs.

Here are the two funniest videos I’ve seen lately :

McCain needs “100 Soldiers, 3 Blackhawks, 2 Apache Gunships” just to prove how safe Baghdad is? Wow, Maverick just crossed over into “Bush Sr. not recognizing a supermarket scanner” cluelessness. At least this ego-stoking waste of military resources makes a good photo op :