Live-Blogging the RNC

9:42PM EST: Cindy McCain says Americans are the most generous in HISTORY? Do you hear that? In ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY. And now she says all women, from the BEGINNING OF TIME. This is a bold claim. I mean I know McCain is old, but he ain’t THAT OLD.

9:44PM EST: Again, what is with Cindy McCain’s outrageous speculative historical claims? How the fuck can she possibly know what the Founding Fathers, who are all dead by the way, would have made of McCain? This is just really irresponsible metaphysics.

9:47PM EST: Really? John McCain is quiet about his experience in Vietnam? Really, quiet?

9:50PM EST: To quote Matthew Yglesias: how the fuck did hockey come to symbolize the quintessential American sport? Why not baseball?

9:57PM EST: Man, I thought you could never possibly ruin Chuck Berry, but I was wrong.

10:02PM EST: You can’t spell “power” without “POW.” Think about it.

10:04PM EST: There you go, some call him POW. There it is, I fucking said it man.

10:06PM EST: John McCain played a role in US history? Really? Come on! He is not the fucking manifestation of Hegelian world-historical Geist…mmmkay?

10:10PM EST: Hmm…McCain gained his strength in a small detention cell after being tortured in a place thousands of miles away…sounds like the life of the Gitmo detainee.

10:13PM EST: You know what else living in a tiny box for five years will do to you? It makes you crazy, so that you say shit that no longer makes any sense.

10:18PM EST: Aside, how fucking awesome would it be if Don LaFontaine did McCain’s narration video? So awesome. RIP Man…in a world without Don LaFontaine, it is tragic indeed.

10:24PM EST: Judging by the frequency of the “USA” chants, one would think that a person needs to be constantly reminded that he does, in fact, live in the United States of America.

10:39PM EST: Smithers, are they booing me? No sir, they are saying “BOOOOURNS.”

10:42PM EST: Another aside: does the “peace” signs being waved everywhere remind anyone of Dr. Strangelove?

10:46PM EST: Do Americans really know better than that? The evidence says no, because despite the known fact that offshore drilling won’t produce lower price for years to come, the majority of the people think that it will. And this is what I don’t like about McCain’s policies: they rely on the assumption that somehow Americans can always get it done.

10:48PM EST: Russia did not attack Georgia for oil! It invaded Georgia because of ethnic nationalism.

10:54PM EST: Obama has, in fact, worked with people across the aisle. How about Tom Coburn and Dick Lugar for starters?

11:04PM EST: Well, that was the end. For what it’s worth, the last little rhetorical flourish was very effective, and McCain delivered it well. A more in-depth of what happened will follow tomorrow.

Ted Stevens’ Legacy

What will we remember Ted Stevens for? His remarkable ability to funnel a shitload of federal funding to his state, or a series of tubes?

Well, if Google is anything to go by, it’s the latter:

This is what happens when you type “about:internets” in Chrome’s address bar.

The Flaming Lips and State-Sponsored Music: Awesome!

By order of the Oklahoma House Current Resolution 1047, The Flaming Lip’s “Do You Realize?” could potentially become the official Oklahoma state’s rock song.

Check out the song now:

The prospect of The Flaming Lips becoming an official state rock band is so awesome that my head just exploded because I does not compute.

So click here and VOTE: tell your friends and neighbors, and tell them to spam rock the vote! At last, an election this year that actually means something.

Sarah Palin is a Fucking Liar

To be honest, I actually quite enjoyed her speech last night: it was feisty as fuck, she went after the other side with teeth fully bared and gloves off, and knocked some good zingers out of the park. Most importantly, she energized the crowd at the RNC, which by that point was on Ambient for the previous two days.

So what’s the problem? It’s only one: that her speech was full of factual inaccuracies, otherwise known as LYING.

Over at the Washington Monthly, they posted just some glaring inaccuracies in her speech, but the one that really gets my goat is the claim that Sarah Palin made regarding Obama’s legislative record:

“But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state Senate. “

This is a goddamn fucking boldfaced lie as far as I’m concerned, because anyone who knows how to use THOMAS can see that there are at least two “major” bills that Obama was heavily with in both the 109th and 110th Congress.

In the 109th Congress, S. 2590, titled “Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act,” which is now Public Law 109-282. This law charged the Office of Management and Budget to create a central government website in which all federal contracts over $25,000 is listed in a easy, searchable database. How this is not an important piece of legislation is really beyond my comprehension.

Disclaimer: To be fair, I only know about this bill because I spent last summer interning at Project on Government Oversight, and one of my assignments was to research the bill, which by then was not fully implemented. So I might be biased because of my personal involvement.

In the 110th Congress, Obama and Dick Lugar introduced a non-profileration bill which also became law.

So my question is: who are the people that wrote the speech, and did they have ANY fucking idea how to use publicly-available information to do research? I mean, the lies can be so easily detected by anyone who has used THOMAS. Not only is this lying, it’s also just fucking incompetent unprofessionalism.

Look, if I can learn how to use THOMAS adequately by the age of 17, someone doing oppo research on a presidential campaign should be able to learn it just as well, if not better. Maybe then they can stop embarassing themselves.