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 they reached him on Saturday morning, the authorities said.

2. Understated Headline of the Week: Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes

3. Interesting:

Experience. In the 2008 presidential election, it’s been a campaign slogan, a debating point and a subject of endless column inches and talk show hours. John McCain and Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin — whose life experiences offer the best preparation for the presidency and vice presidency? Does it help to be a naval aviator? A community organizer? A senator? A small-town mayor? Does one trump another? To answer those questions, the Op-Ed page asked people whose résumés overlap with the candidates’ to explain how the qualities they’ve needed to draw on for their jobs and their lives would come in handy in the White House.

4. I’m looking forward to picking up Dexter Filkins’ new book, On the Ground, about his experiences reporting during the Iraq War; but I’m not a fan of this dry, loquacious review. (Though I do like that the author of the review gave a needed shout out to Michael Herr, my favorite war correspondent.)

5. Sarah Palin’s hair! How many column inches were given to the wars in which we’re embroiled?

6. And a nice little column on dating in the Google era.

Plus a bunch of other stuff you folks don’t care about.

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 are like a guy in line at the theater who loudly proclaims the ending of the movie.

Off to C-SPAN for me.

An aside: Can anyone confirm that all those little flags the delegates are waving are union-made? Can’t be shipping our flag-making to China any more!

But another news item of immense import surfaced today as well: the agreement by the Iraqi and American governments on a deadline for the withdrawal of most U.S. troops by 2011.

Now, aside from the groundbreaking nature of this agreement, I would like to suggest a possible impact on the presidential election.

Given that a large part of the campaign (aside from the economy) is centered around foreign policy (especially Iraq, Afghanistan and, more recently, Georgia), does this agreement not, in some respects, take the issue of when to bring the troops home off the table?

And, if so, does that not hurt Obama more than McCain? As it is, Obama has been able to hammer McCain on his judgment in sending troops to Iraq (while Obama opposed it in the first place) and his (out of context) comment about remaining in Iraq for a hundred years. By losing this as an issue, Obama loses one of his most effective talking points and the motivation for some of his supporters to work so diligently for the campaign.

Hopefully, I am overestimating the impact this agreement will have on the campaign, but it should be interesting to watch unfold.

For the conspiracy theorists out there: Does this also not smack of a President Bush playing politics with the war?

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 and his out-of-state buddies spent the morning attacking Senator Cornyn

2) according to finance team, the fact that Dean and Pelosi came in to shill for Noreiga really fired up our supporters the last 24 hours. We have raised well over 10K and I think we could another 10k if we send out the email below again.

Talk soon,

Kevin

You know, it might be a good idea to hire someone (or two someone’s, since Rob Jessmer, Cornyn’s campaign manager didn’t even correct the misspelling in the e-mail) who can actually spell your opponent’s name. Especially your communications director.

As for the message . . . Noriega and the rest of the Netroots and Dem leadership who showed up bashed Cornyn!? STOP THE PRESSES! SOUND THE ALARM! TIP THE COW!

Anyway, I guess “Buck Smith”/David Beckwith must be earning his keep (and some Democratic schwag) by attending Netroots Nation.

Nonetheless, Kevin, you really need to learn how to (a) spell and (b) not make yourself look like an ass in the press (yes, I’m talking about that asinine comment about “Buck Smith” speaking for himself and all that other BS you pulled from somewhere near your nose that resembles an asshole when BOR outed Beckwith).

By the way, Kev: Since “Buck Smith” speaks for himself, why isn’t he posting on BOR any more?

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 had in that video . . .”

I want to see if recommending yourself for a raise on a blog works. So here goes:

Hey, TFN, I think I deserve a raise. How ’bout it?

Joe, same for you.

Pate got to get paid, son.

Boy, I hope it pans out well — or at least that I’m not forced to resign my positions in a few weeks when the media/blog heat has subsided.

(If this doesn’t work, I’ll try posting the request on a conservative Web site under a nom de plume.)

Next up:

An item entitled “Watch ‘Charlie Rose – An hour with General David Petraeus’” I sent myself through Google Reader on 10 SEP 2007 at 8:18 AM. I think the title is self-explanatory. The reason I want to watch it — and still save it? Because I love me some Petraeus. Link still works. Delete.

Next is a really old e-mail (17 OCT 2007 at 3:25 PM) with a link to The Blakes’ (a band) Myspace page. I’m deleting without looking further. Can’t remember why I saved it. If anyone knows if they’re any good, let me know and I’ll look into ‘em this time around.

22 OCT 2007 at 11:12 AM: Another Google Reader e-mail with a link to the Mother Jones’ issue focusing on leaving Iraq. The e-mail itself contains an interview with T.X. Hammes that was posted on the Kings of War blog, written by various faculty and research students of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. The link still works.

Okay, I’m going to stop here again for a while. Maybe I’ll aim for getting rid of three old e-mails per post.

Does anyone else find random stuff on the Web, e-mail it to themselves and then let it sit there lingering forever?

Joe lied to me. He said parking would be a breeze on Saturday. Fortunately, there was a breeze as we walked from 7th Street to the Convention Center on 2nd.

We couldn’t get into the main exhibition hall because we didn’t have credentials (oh-so-Democratic!), so we headed over to another hall to scour all the booths and peer into the delegate registration areas looking for extra convention bags. I “stole” five or six delegate convention bags — the bags given to delegates commemorating the Convention and filled with schwag — at the Convention in 2004. This time, we either got there too late and they’d been hauled away the extras or they learned from last year not to leave them out. Either way, we couldn’t find any with which to, as Misty said on Twitter, abscond.

After failing to sticky-finger any bags, we wandered among the rows of Democratic organization tables, where they hawked T-shirts, buttons and god-knows-what-else. We didn’t see Joe, who was supposed to be manning the HDCC table, but we did see the abandoned TFN table — they took down their table prematurely not knowing that today would be packed.

We headed to the main exhibit hall entrance to try to see what was going on. A guy offered us Guest Passes, so we walked a quarter-mile through the Convention Center to get to the guest entrance only to find that it was a big-screen feed from the main hall. Motherfucker.

They started the ceremonies and then broke in with Hillary Clinton’s concession speech (finally!), but the feed kept dying, Hillary kept freezing on the screen and the audio went dead repeatedly. We finally headed home.

Now we’re drinking at Dolce Vita and considering heading to the Helio Sequence show at Mohawk.

There’s been a lot of, frankly, ridiculous prophesying that Obama or Clinton will show up, but that has finally been put to rest by Obama tapping Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (he with the eyebrow) to attend on his behalf and Clinton’s all-but-certain withdrawal from the race on Saturday. Still, some people just never give up hope (it took him until the Clinton campaign announced its ending to get the picture).

Along with the convention there always comes a host of parties thrown by legislators, lobbyists, supporters of presidential candidates and, well, bloggers. While the Texas “‘netroots” (or “Texroots”) may not be the powerful political force they believe themselves to be, I’m certain they’re fun to get drunk with. Personally, I want to see Vince Leibowitz table-dance.

While I’d like to say that I will attend the Blogger’s Caucus or one of the many other parties, I can’t guarantee anything. See, after I have my double whiskey and three beers at Dolce Vita on the way home from work (usually between four and six) each day, I rarely want to venture out once I get home.

Not that it matters if I show up. I’m no big Texas political personality. In fact, I’ve only ever broken one story (this, obviously, doesn’t count because it was IRL rather than online), and most of the blogosphere probably still resents me for running Ray McMurrey‘s unsuccessful campaign against Rick Noriega (our campaign still being the best thing to ever happen to Rick).

So, maybe I’ll make it to a party — especially the Blogger’s Caucus — and maybe I won’t. No biggie. I’ll get drunk either way and no one will miss me.

UPDATE: Yes, that is a picture of me on the cover of this magazine.

Give it a shot.

I got 44 out of 50 correct. Post your score below.

Also, to my surprise, one of my friends, Krissi Trumeter, criticized my old college friend, Sofia Resnick’s, recent article in the Austin Chronicle. What’s surprising is that they don’t know one another. Austin is a small town.

To see Krissi’s critique of the article, click here and scroll down to “Only State Facts . . . Not Romantic Illusions.”

[musings: test]

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 on the left feared that it would restore the worst of the same era, returning us to the shackles of censorship and conformism, jingoism and Joe McCarthy. But as far as Hollywood is concerned, another decade entirely seems to have slouched round again: the paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.

He then goes through many film genres and compares recent films to those made in the ’70s. He even gives shout-outs to some of my favorite television shows: The Wire and Battlestar Galactica.

. . . [T]he first great revisionist sci-fi serial, Battlestar Galactica, helmed by an ex–Star Trek writer and featuring enough sex, violence, and religious fanaticism to set Gene Roddenberry spinning in his grave.

Most important, though, is that he questions the reason we have returned to such a style:

This last reality brings us to the question of how authentic our back-to-the-’70s moment really is. The Vietnam War was a cultural phenomenon in part because it couldn’t help being one—there was no way for Americans to keep the war at arm’s length, not with more than 50,000 dead, a million deployed over the course of the war, and every able-bodied teen and twentysomething at risk of conscription. In contrast, the Iraq War, a lower-casualty conflict fought by an all-volunteer military, takes place at a greater distance from the everyday lives of those Americans who don’t have a family member deployed overseas. The objective correlatives needed for a truly pessimistic era simply don’t exist for many Americans today. The last time around, we were participants; this time, we’re voyeurs.

It’s an interesting view. Read it yourself.

In other news, the Supreme Court has just ruled “that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.” This is just bad public policy that hurts the poor, minorities, the elderly and the disabled. Ugh.