LingleChannel

Money is important in election. You can use it to fund local offices which can door-knock to promote your candidacy. A little more and you can purchase television ads, to persuade voters via the power of vague testimonials and grainy footage of your opponent. A little more than that, and you can use it to purchase your own television network and just have them promote you 24/7:

Former Gov. Linda Lingle (R) today launched her own cable television channel, which is dedicated solely to providing information about her Senate campaign and the issues facing Hawaii.

LL2012 can be found on digital channel 110 for Oceanic Time Warner subscribers. According to the cable company, this is the first time a U.S. political candidate has used a dedicated cable channel, the campaign said.

I don't even know what to say. My first question is how much material can she even have to fill up an entire channel? My second question is what are we coming to as a nation?

Via DK Elections.

Israeli Supreme Court Overturns Ban

Fabulous news:

Israel's Supreme court overruled on Wednesday a parliamentary panel which had decided to bar Israeli Arab parties from running in next month's parliamentary election.

The court issued its decision in response to an appeal filed by Arab politicians against the ban. A spokesman for the Courts Administration said judges overturned the ban in an unanimous vote Wednesday.

In response to the court decision, Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi said: "We have defeated fascism, but this battle is not quite complete, discrimination has become centralized. We will finish this operation in Israel on the day of elections."

The Central Elections Committee (CEC) last week banned the Arab parties United Arab List-Ta'al and Balad from running in February's parliamentary elections amid accusations of racism from Arab MKs.

The fact that the decision was unanimous is also welcome. Had the ban not been overturned, Arab parties were justifiably threatening to boycott the upcoming election and establish an alternative parliament of their own.

Meanwhile, although these declarations of mine are always moot because I'm not an Israeli citizen, I'm renouncing my allegiance to Kadima for supporting this maneuver, and am throwing myself back into the camp of Meretz (which has long been supported by my home Synagogue anyway), the only Zionist party to oppose the ban.

OJ

I rarely drink alcohol. And when I do, I only drink very small amounts (not even enough to get buzzed). It's a source of much amusement to me that this means I can likely never run for President (admittedly, there are plenty of reasons why I can never run for President -- this is just one of the more absurd ones).

But it goes beyond alcohol. Despite four years of debate and four years of college, I don't drink coffee, or any coffee related drinks. Nor do I drink tea. I rarely even drink soda (I'm practically Mormon!). Juice, water, and Gatorade are my fluids of choice.

So it was with a wry smile that I read this hilarious, apparently serious bit from Commentary Magazine trying to make hay out of Obama's choice of Orange Juice over Coffee at an Indiana diner.

The switch from juice to coffee is a rite of adulthood. It's not that Obama seemed to hold himself above the coffee drinkers. It's that he seemed to lag behind them. He's still on fruit juice while the adults are sipping bitter and bracing coffee.

To be fair, even Commentary's readership seemed to think this was a bit ridiculous. But I thought it was uproariously funny, if only to show how thin the anti-Obama gruel is getting. And at least mildly hopeful, in that it appears to have finally hit the extreme outer limit of when campaign gossip gets too frivolous that even sympathetic readers finally rebel.

You Throw Your Cards Down First

Ann and Jessica of Feministing issue an ultimatum to male politicians: Stop playing the gender card already!

It's tongue-in-cheek, but quite good. See my further thoughts on the topic here.

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Link to the 2007 Weblog Award Polls: Vote Debate Link

Test Message

I'll admit that I fear change, and so this move to the new blogger is rather scary. I don't like having to login with a gmail address I never use. Aside from that, nothing seems to be different but some minor stylistic issues. Which I don't like. Because they're different.

But since I need to write a post to confirm that this new version truly is the blogger cataclysm, here we go. A Washington Post article on Barack Obama's message man, David Axelrod, contained the following blurb:

Campaigns are narratives annotated with policy discursions.

True? I think so. And unfortunately, nobody reads the annotations. On the other hand, Obama's strength--fairly or no--is in the packaging more than the substantive content. So even though I think Obama could and should win on a policy race alone, in the political campaigns we get stuck with, he's pretty well positioned too.