What You Missed If You Didn’t Read Today’s The New York Times
1. Read about the guy who used a park bench as shelter during Hurricane Ike. And this guy:

Southwest of Galveston, officers said that one man from Surfside Beach was the only resident who did not evacuate the highly damaged area. He was drunk when [...]

Okay, listen Cable News pundits. Listen, Keith Olbermann.
I DO NOT WANT YOU TO READ ME THE SPEECH OBAMA IS GOING TO GIVE IN AN HOUR.
There is a reason I’m watching the Convention on television. TO WATCH OBAMA GIVE HIS ACCEPTANCE SPEECH — not hear it from you before he’s even walked onto the stage.
You bastards [...]

Look . . .
Look . . .
BAM!
You just saved the world from another idiot motorcycler.
Thank you.
From the bottom of my heart.

Just got this great e-mail from John Cornyn’s campaign pimping their last anti-Noriega fundraising e-mail:
Team:
See note below from our communications director, thanks for what you have done in last 24 hours, let’s keep it going.

From: Kevin McLaughlin
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 1:40 PM
To: Rob Jesmer
Subject: Nutroots
Rob-
2 things;
1) Our guys at the convention told us Noreiga [...]

This post is in honor of “Buck Smith” (aka U.S. Senator John Cornyn staffer David Beckwith), who has recently been outed using a pseudonym to post on Democratic (and possibly other) sites.
In one post (referring to the “Big John” video), he commented:
“I personally believe Beckwith deserves a raise and/or a promotion for whatever role he [...]

I’ve realized it’s not a good idea to promise myself (and definitely not any readers my delusional mind thinks are out there) that I will post once a day. It just ain’t gonna happen. I’ll keep that defaulted promise in the back of my mind — so maybe it will urge me to write more [...]

From four until . . . when did we get home?
My brain feels dehydrated.
In the news.

The Austin Chronicle is reporting that:
Saturday night, Tim Mahoney and [Speaker of the House Tom Craddick crony] Harrison Keller qualified for a runoff election in the race for Austin Community College Board of Trustees, with the former getting 48.5% of the vote and the latter taking 33%. Today, Keller decided to withdraw . . . [...]

Really.
Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat from an old issue of the New York Press.
On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit.
And this:
On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never [...]

Ross Douthat penned an interesting column in a recent issue of the Altantic saying that post-9/11 America has, culturally, returned to the paranoid style of the 1970s.
Conservatives such as Noonan hoped that 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and ’50s, playing Pearl Harbor to a new era of patriotism and solidarity. Many [...]