Mark Halperin complaining about the shoddy state of political journalism is like T-Pain complaining about musicians overusing auto-tune. Throughout the election, I kept up with Halperin’s pseudo-blog at Time.com because it serves as a perfect barometer for beltway conventional wisdom. Of course, part of the reason the Drudge fanboy’s site was such essential reading is that Halperin’s work is so mind-numbingly insipid that it’s little fortune cookie-sized nuggets of punditry infect the mainstream. For example, here’s the most recent entry in his series “HALPERIN’S TAKE: The Five Most Important People in American Politics Right Now Who Aren’t Barack Obama” :

1. Rahm Emanuel
2. Pete Rouse
3. Joe Biden
4. George W. Bush
5. Tim Geithner

That’s the whole thing. Five names without any context or explanation. Halperin’s point here isn’t to actually say anything interesting, he just wants to imply that he has some special insight into the political scene that you lack. What? You had to Google one of the names? Well, that’s because Halperin is smarter than you.

Halperin’s other well-known gimmick was to award a “winner” each week as if the complexities of a presidential campaign can be boiled down to the an arbitrary scorekeeping system. I can’t help but enjoy the irony that the king of banal punditry, who’s now bemoaning the “disgusting” pro-Obama bias in the media, saw fit to declare Obama the winner of the six weeks leading up to the election. Then again, that isn’t necessarily evidence of hypocrisy, it could be that the pro-Obama bias was so extreme that it was even able to penetrate the ideologically pure mind of Mark Halperin.

Or it could just mean that the press coverage was more positive for No-Drama Obama because he didn’t spend the entire election embarrassing himself the way John McCain did.

Joe Liberman is a sanctimonious dickhead who was rewarded by his fellow Senators for stabbing their party in the back and using his committee post to protect George W. Bush. Hillary Clinton voted in favor of a resolution the Bush Administration was using too help march to war with Iran. Barack Obama has internalized the whole “team of rivals” concept to the point that he’s not only going to appoint Republicans to his cabinet, but solicit their discredited ideas in his decision-making progress.

I could freak out about all of this, but I won’t. The Obama Administration has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enact a progressive agenda. For now, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and approach every big decision he makes with the question “How does this help Obama move his agenda through Congress?”. Does saving Lieberman’s ass make it more likely that moderate Republicans will join Democrats? Does appointing Clintonites to various positions make it more likely the Dems will solidly support Obama’s plans?

It’s easy to get infuriated about the day to day news coming out of Washington, but I’m trying to keep my eyes on the prize here. I want universal healthcare, an end to the war in Iraq, and an economic bailout that creates jobs through a massive government investment infrastructure and alternative energy. My anger at Joe Lierberman doesn’t compare to my desire for a truly progressive agenda to make it through Congress. Two months away from inauguration and consensus already is starting to coalesce around goals #1 & #3 (with the Iraqis doing their best to make #2 a reality). As long as Obama’s pragmatic choices make it easier to make his stated agenda a reality (rather than simply watering down his own plans to make them more palatable to centrists), then he can declare Joe Lieberman emperor for life for all I care (though he’ll never replace Norton in my heart).

I just saw a commercial for Bud Light that ended with their slogan “The difference is drinkability”, but is that really something to brag about when you’re selling a beverage? That’s like McDonalds bragging that their hamburgers don’t cause spontaneous vomiting. When I hear a beer described as “drinkable”, I can’t help but wonder why they don’t use a more enticing word like “delicious” (of course, in the case of Bush Light, it’s because that would be false advertising).

When it comes to bailing out the auto industry, count me in the “let them starve” camp. The auto industry has been outsourcing American jobs for 25 years now with little regard for the devastated communities they’ve left in their wake (seriously, re-watch Roger & Me sometime). The big three have also used their lobbying might to oppose every environmental regulation in their sights. And on top of all of that, their cars suck. Bailing out the auto companies whose single-minded devotion to SUV’s made them blind to the hybrid revolution is like bailing out a record company that hasn’t had a hit since “The Macarena”. Screw them.

That said, I am sensitive to the fact that letting the big three go out of business would be a pretty serious blow to our already fragile economy. But if the solution to what ails automakers is an infusion of cash, wouldn’t it be better to get banks involved? If we’ve already set aside $700 billion to help bailout banks in the hopes that it will free up lending, wouldn’t it be a better idea to just have Congress mandate that banks participating in the bailout must offer debtor-in-possession loans to the big three. That way, if an auto manufacturer fails, they need to file for Chapter 11 like any other company whose poor business decisions lead to their downfall AND the banks free up some cash and start lending again.

Obviously this is probably an oversimplification, but there’s gotta be a better way of saving the auto industry than just writing another giant check.

I was really skeptical at first (who wouldn’t be?), but now that HuffPo is reporting that Obama has offered the Secretary of State position to Clinton, I think it’s a pretty good idea. Not only would it be a nice fit, but it’s a win-win for both Obama and Clinton. Here’s the upside for Obama :

The best reason for Obama to be looking for a place in his cabinet for Clinton is simple: to get her out of the Senate. Just ask George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter what it was like to have a once or future presidential rival in the Senate serving as a one-person Roman tribunal. Remember how easily the press gravitated to John McCain in ‘01 or Bob Kerrey in ‘93 or Ted Kennedy in ‘77 to allow them to be one-senator judge/juries on Administration proposals? The upside for Obama putting Clinton at State (or even the Pentagon) is that it gets her out of the Senate and gets her out of the domestic policy debates.

For Clinton, if she’s really interested in making another run at the White House in 2016, then this will be the perfect setup for her. Taking on a high-profile, nonpartisan role like Secretary of State would keep her name in the news and do so in a much more positive light than the vapid “he said, she said” press-manufactured drama that largely defines her public persona now.

Additionally, if she wants to be President, getting out of the Senate would be a much better long-term career decision. Of the dozens of Senators over the past half century that have tried to make the jump into the White House, the only two who have been successful have had relatively short careers (Kennedy 8 years, Obama 4 years). I get the impression that the longer someone serves in a legislative role, the more they’re opened up to the “he/she has never run anything” executive experience argument or silly attacks like “Senator X has voted against puppies and ice cream more than 900 times”.
It seems to me that the longer you stick around the Senate, the harder it is to escape.

Sorry, gang. It turns out Sarah Palin isn’t THAT dumb. On the plus side, she refuses to go away, so at least we’ll have that trainwreck to enjoy for a little while longer. It’s amazing to think that Palin has been in the national spotlight for less than three months and she’s already gone from serious vice-presidential contender to the sort of “why won’t she go away?” level of fame that’s usually reserved for former reality show contestants.

UPDATE : My bad. It turns out I misread the article regarding the Plain hoax. She really is THAT dumb. Sorry folks. Blogging and NyQuil don’t mix.

There’s a fantastic sketch in the first season of Mr. Show that parodies religious talk shows like the 700 Club in which a member of an ex-gay ministry recounts his various lapses into “homosinuality“. The kicker is at the end when the host, previewing an upcoming interview, says “[He] will tell us about his most recent lapse and the lapse he has planned for August which should take him to Rio de Janeiro.” This, for some reason, reminds me of the best quote about John McCain I’ve read anywhere :

The contradictions give rise to questions about the essential McCain. Is he an opportunist with a conscience, or a man with so singular a moral compass that sometimes only he knows where it points?

In fact, McCain lives by a series of honor codes, instilled in him by his father (an admiral) and his father’s father (also an admiral). To boil them down to their simplest formulation: One must never lie, cheat or steal. McCain would be the first to admit that he has failed, sometimes spectacularly, at all three. But he also has perfected the familiar American ritual of coming clean and moving on.

“He is the best apologizer in politics,” said Dan Schnur, who was McCain’s campaign spokesman in 2000 and now directs the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

That’s John McCain in a nutshell.

I find it amazing that so many in the press seemed so disillusioned by John McCain’s campaign this year and were so quick to praise his gracious concession speech as the “real” McCain. He’s the honorable “country first” public servant AND the sleazy opportunist scumbag who spent the last few weeks implying that our next president is a terrorist-affiliated, socialist America-hater. McCain acolytes are so in love with the notion of McCain the POW who has bravely owns up to his moral failings, they overlook the fact that his string of moral and ethical lapses are as intristic parts of his character as the virtues that he extols on the campaign trail. John McCain the honor-obsessed POW and John McCain the lobbyist-courting adulterer are the SAME PERSON. They’re both the “real” McCain.

As Barack Obama begins the hard work of turning his campaign promises into reality come January, we’ll see constant reminders that the nasty xenophobia of the McCain/Palin campaign has poisoned the well of public opinion. John McCain didn’t have to run a dirty campaign. He could have just been the decent man that we’ve all seen he can be. Rather than lose a campaign with his dignity intact, John McCain made a choice to repeat his cycle of dishonor followed by a public show of remorse. Fool me once and all that.

So while many might want to look at John McCain’s concession speech and his inevitable public mea culpas as a return to form, forgiveness for “the best apologizer in politics” won’t be coming quickly from me. Anyone who follows John McCain’s career could have seen his campaign’s “relapse” coming from a mile away. Spare me.

In regards to Joe Lieberman, as much of a dickhead as he has been, I don’t think it’s a good idea in the long run to seek punitive measures against him for his support of John McCain. It’ll just give him another reason to be self-righteous and make the Democratic leadership look petty. Having said that, as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Joe Lieberman has done nothing. It’s not that he’s been ineffective, but that he hasn’t tried to accomplish anything. No oversight, no hearings, no subpoenas, nothing. Considering the breadth of the crimes that have been committed by the Bush Administration that fall under the jurisdiction of Lieberman’s leadership, the lack of oversight is unconscionable. That he let his support of George W. Bush overshadow his responsibilities as a Senator isn’t just a stab in the back to his constituents, it’s proof that he’s refused to perform the duties that he swore he would. For that reason alone, he should be removed from any leadership posts within the Senate. The responsibilities that Joe Lieberman has abdicated are too important to leave in the hands of someone who’s unwilling to work hard for the American people.

Four years and one day ago, after George W. Bush defeated John Kerry by 2 million popular votes and 34 electoral votes, he held a press conference in which he declared :

I feel it is necessary to move an agenda that I told the American people I would move. Something refreshing about coming off an election, even more refreshing since we all got some sleep last night, but there’s — you go out and you make your case, and you tell the people this is what I intend to do. And after hundreds of speeches and three debates and interviews and the whole process, where you keep basically saying the same thing over and over again, that when you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view, and that’s what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as the President, now let’s work to — and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let’s work together.

And it’s one of the wonderful — it’s like earning capital. You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That’s what happened in the — after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I’ve earned capital in this election — and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on

Yesterday, Barack Obama beat John McCain by more than 7 million popular votes and at least 186 electoral votes. That’s a lot of political capital and he earned it the old-fashioned way, by bringing people together :

When it was over, more than 120 million pulled a lever or mailed a ballot, and the system could barely accommodate the demands of Extreme Democracy. Obama won more votes than anyone else in U.S. history, the biggest Democratic victory since Lyndon Johnson crushed another Arizona Senator 44 years ago. Obama won men, which no Democrat had managed since Bill Clinton. He won 54% of Catholics, 66% of Latinos, 68% of new voters — a multicultural, multigenerational movement that shatters the old political ice pack. He let loose a deep blue wave that washed well past the coasts and the college towns, into the South through Virginia and Florida, the Mountain West with Colorado and New Mexico, into the Ohio Valley and the Midwestern battlegrounds: you could almost walk from Maine to Minnesota without getting your feet wet in a red state. After months of mapmaking all the roads to 270, Obama tore right past with ease.

As the New York Times showed, Obama’s victory wasn’t just isolated to big cities on either coast.

Barack Obama ran on a platform of fundamental change to the way our government works and serves its people. As such, his overwhelming victory is a clear mandate for the changes that he advocated : healthcare reform, ending the war in Iraq, and most importantly, an Apollo-like alternative energy project which he described in a recent interview with Joe Klein :

The biggest problem with our energy policy has been to lurch from crisis to trance. And what we need is a sustained, serious effort. Now, I actually think the biggest opportunity right now is not just gas prices at the pump but the fact that the engine for economic growth for the last 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20, and that was consumer spending. I mean, basically, we turbo-charged this economy based on cheap credit. Whatever else we think is going to happen over the next certainly 5 years, one thing we know, the days of easy credit are going to be over because there is just too much de-leveraging taking place, too much debt both at the government level, corporate level and consumer level. And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that’s going to be my number one priority when I get into office

Unlike 2004, in which George W. Bush misinterpreted his victory as a mandate to privatize social security, Barack Obama has been very open about his intentions for this entire campaign. Yes, Obama has promised to work across the aisle (a promise I think he intends to keep, btw), but he did so while running on a platform that was, if John McCain and his Republican allies are to be believed, “liberal” and “socialist”.

As John McCain was quick to point out in their final debate, Obama wasn’t running against George W. Bush, he was running against John McCain, a straight-talking Republican “maverick”. If John McCain is the centrist reformer that he claimed to be, then the contrast between McCain and Obama is even more stark. Given their consummate differences, shouldn’t the fact that voters chose Barack Obama mean something?

Now that he has won the presidency in a landslide, Barack Obama is under no obligation to govern like a centrist or temper his policy goals to accommodate a point-of-view that the American people have decisively rejected. Obama won. Elections have consequences.

I’m having a hard time expressing in words how I feel right now. On the one hand, the election of Barack Obama is one of the great moments in our nation’s history. As my mother said last night “Save your papers tomorrow morning to pass on to your children and grandchildren.” Obama’s landslide victory serves as a mirror-image and bookend of sorts to the last American experience that was this universal and emotionally-resonant, 9/11. The dreadful shadow of fear, confusion, and anger that has defined the last seven years has given way to a new sense of unity, optimism, and patriotism. It’s been a privilege to be a part of this moment.

With so many great things to say about this election, I can’t help but dwell on the fact that Prop. 8 has passed. The fact that this failure was in “liberal” California was a crushing blow. Through shameful propaganda and the inadvertent assistance of the mushy-mouthed Democrats who tried to straddle both sides of this issue (I’m looking at you, Barack), bigotry has been enshrined into our state constitution. Thousands of marriages are going to be nullified because a slim majority of insecure strangers want their discomfort about homosexuality to be codified into law.

It’s hard to celebrate an Obama victory with this stunning reminder that Americans can still be small and bitter and hateful and cruel.

I know where I’ll be tuning in to watch the election returns :

It’s election night, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer is in New York talking to an Obama campaign strategist in Chicago.

But instead of the split screen or window TV viewers might typically see during live remote interviews, the Obama spokesperson will be projected as a three-dimensional hologram, making it appear as if he or she is in the Manhattan studio with Blitzer. The network plans to conduct similar holographic interviews with representatives from the McCain campaign in Phoenix.

Thank goodness for that. If CNN didn’t provide some flashy special effects, we might get bored.

UPDATE : Hahahaha. It’s as dumb as I expected it to be :

Okay, maybe I won’t be watching CNN all night. I dunno if I can stand them interrupting their campaign coverage to gush over their new toys.

I don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to predictions, but my feeling is that the Obama campaign has the wind at their backs right now and that will end up pushing him past the finish line in all of the major swing states. Here’s the map as I see it :

My guess is that Obama will not only win the states that every other guess is giving him (FL, PA, OH, VA), but states like Montana, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Carolina, where I see a wave of national support making the crucial difference tomorrow. I think what we’re going to see is undecided voters looking at the choice between a candidate that makes them feel good and one that makes them feel bad, and going with the former.

That said, I think Georgia, Arizona, and Nebraska’s second congressional districts will be close, but ultimately go to McCain. If Obama has a better night than I predict, those will be the states that fall into his column. If he has a slightly worse night, I think North Carolina or Indiana will fall out of Obama’s grasp. I’ve got a really good feeling about North Dakota and Montana. Obama’s got some serious momentum there and I think having guys like MT Gov. Brian Schweitzer out there on the campaign trail will make all the difference.

In terms of the Senate races, I’m thinking Franken is a lock in Minnesota (have you noticed an optimistic streak yet?). Granted, he’s barely ahead of Norm Coleman in the current polls, but there are three things I think will lean the race more in Franken’s direction : (1) Coleman is suing Franken because an ad hurt his feelings, which just makes him look like a total ass-wipe. (2) Coleman keeps making a big deal out of Franken’s some of the dirtier jokes Franken has told over the years, which makes him look like a little crybaby bitch. (3) Support for the independent candidate in the race may erode and that support would likely go against the incumbent. Also, Norm Coleman looks like what would happen if Eric Roberts was hit in the face with a brick.

I think the Georgia and Kentucky Senate races are going to be tougher to pull off, though a strong showing by Obama might just push the Georgia race over the top. I hope so, because if there’s any incumbent that I want to see thrown out on his ass, it’s Saxby Chambliss, the dickhead who won his Senate seat by comparing his opponent to Osama Bin Laden.

I just realized that as this post went on, I was using more and more profanity. Well, here’s a little more for you : Fuck Proposition 8. While other states have had anti-gay marriage ballot measures that are largely toothless since those states don’t even allow gay marriage in the first place, California’s Prop. 8 would have the effect of nullifying thousands of marriages because a bunch of insecure heterosexuals are uncomfortable with the notion of two dudes kissing. After looking really scary for a while, I’m predicting that Prop. 8 will fail. The sudden surge support for “Yes on 8″ caught a lot of people by surprise, but the “No on 8″ campaign has come back in a big way with quite a few sobering television ads as well as the support of Schwarzenegger and Obama.

UPDATE : The DailyKos embeddable map was messed up, so I created a screenshot instead. In my haste, I accidentally turned WV blue. My actual prediction is that WV will stay red. I see Markos’s map is similar to mine, though he sees MT & ND staying red and GA going Dem.