I liked Michael Calderone’s piece on the Sabbath gasbags, especially this:

The shows are particularly ripe targets for critics who see them as the epitome of insider Washington and conventional wisdom. James Wolcott, writing in Vanity Fair last year, for example, described watching the show that Stephanopoulos recently vacated to be “like receiving an engraved invitation to apoplexy.”

“With occasional exceptions, the Sunday shows come across as geriatric and insular, having long been eclipsed and upstaged by Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, Fox News, MSNBC and much of the Web,” New York Times columnist Frank Rich, a frequent critic, said in an e-mail to POLITICO.

I always wonder if the reason that these shows have such old guests (McCain, Broder) is that they have such old audiences. But, honestly, I’m pretty sure my 89 year-old grandmother is sick of Cokie Roberts and David Broder by now. So that can’t be the whole explanation.

Is everyone else as sick of hearing about the new Halperin book (annoying titled “Game Change”) as I am? I don’t care what Harry Reid said about “Negro dialects”, what John Edwards’ mistress is like, whether Cindy McCain had an affair or not, and what the latest from the Schmidt-O’Palin smackdown is.

I should probably just be grateful that Tiger Woods doesn’t make an appearance in the book (he doesn’t, right?), but the whole thing depresses me, it all feels like some recounting of sordid deeds among the ruling class in some long-dead civilization.

Two Hour Chuck tonight!

Glad NBC is canning Leno- bet they could use a drama like Southland right about now.

This is nauseating, even by her standards:

He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.

I think I just threw up in my mouth.

Go for it. I absolutely hate rooting for the Ravens, but they are up against Hitler Stalin Darth Vader Michael Moore Tom Brady and the Patriots.

This is kind of nuts (from TPM):

Special elections are notoriously hard to poll because it’s hard to figure out just who is going to show up to vote. (That’s the reference to the ‘screen’—how the pollster figures out who is a likely voter.) But this is a helluva a spread. Public Policy Polling last night released it’s survey of the special election to fill the seat of Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. And they have Republican Scott Brown actually one point ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley. That’s essentially a toss up. But still. The thought that the GOP might take Kennedy’s seat—is a huge deal not only in symbolic terms but also in very real practical ones: it might well put an end to Health Care Reform for good.

But here’s the thing, the Boston Globe also has a poll out this morning. And they have Coakley up by 15 points.

So what explains this crazy spread? One thing to note is that the PPP poll is a bit more recent, though seemingly not enough to explain the huge spread. At least not all of it. Another interesting thing about the two polls is that they’re not that far off on Coakley’s number: PPP has her at 47% and the Globe has her at 53%. The difference is in Brown’s number—48% vs. 36%. As I said, I think the whole story here is that screen the two pollsters are using to see who’s is going to vote.

Tom Schaller has more.

If Coakley loses, health care reform may be gone.

This scares the living daylights out of me.

Update. This is just weird:

Brown, a guest at a King Philip Regional High School assembly to discuss legislative initiatives, opened by reading obscenity-laced facebook.com Web site comments directed against him for his anti-gay marriage stance and, by association, against his family.

He said some of the written comments attributed to KP students, whom he named aloud at the assembly, were directed at his daughter.

The lawmaker held captive to his outrage many KP students who were innocent of the name-calling and foul language, and did so in a manner unbecoming to his roles as caring parent and respected lawmaker. Who among us would not be prepared to do battle against anyone disparaging and dishonoring our loved ones?

Enjoy. I’ll be on the road.

Make your own choices about Dances with Space Smurfs, but take my word on this: You should go see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, on the big screen, as soon as possible.

If Heath Ledger had to leave us, as the Irish lament goes, before he could comb grey hair, it’s a very fine thing that he left us this as his final appearance—and a tribute to the gifts and the hearts of Depp, Law, and Farrell that the transitions within the film are so seamless. Christopher Plummer is in fine form, Lily Cole is both scrumptious and heartbreakingly vulnerable, Vern Troyer gets to act, Tom Waits gets to play the sideshow freak of his twisted dreams, and Andrew Garfield has a great future ahead of him.

As the critics have said, Terry Gilliam gets full scope for all his marvelous tricks in this movie. (I only wish it could have been done in IMAX 3-D!) Monty Python fans, Terry Pratchett fans, those who loved Time Bandits when they were young and those who loved Twelve Monkeys when they were not so young, all need to see this movie. It is simultaneously packed with surprises, and so meticulously engineered that you recognise every twist as having been signposted along the way. I’m looking forward to seeing it again while it’s in the theatres, and I can hardly wait for the DVD version (hopefully with a full Director’s Commentary track).

Be sure to sit through the end credits, and remember that the Trickster always tells us one true thing:

“There is no black magic, only cheap tricks.”

Not to pat ourselves on the back, but we’ve been talking about this idiotic meme for weeks:

Like every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy, President Obama is battling the perception that he’s a wimp on national security.

It’s not just coming from Republicans (for example, Dick Cheney’s accusation that Mr. Obama is trying to pretend that the country isn’t at war). Now barbs are coming from the center too. This week’s Foreign Policy magazine has a provocative cover: Mr. Obama next to Jimmy Carter with — gasp — an “equals” sign in the middle. New York Times/CBS polling shows that public approval of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy dropped 9 points to 50 percent between last April and November. Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on the Daily Beast blog two weeks ago that Mr. Obama needs to toughen up with his adversaries. “He puts far too much store on being the smartest guy in the room,” Mr. Gelb wrote. “He’d do well to remember that Jimmy Carter also rang all the I.Q. bells.”

Personally, I’m not sure how CFR qualifies as centrist, or why anyone takes the group seriously at all: Amity Shlaes is a senior fellow in economic history there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s plenty of smart people there, but you’re only as serious as your craziest senior fellow, in my book.

Update. CFR probably does qualify as centrist. Its president, Richard Haas, was fairly anti-Iraq war (mostly after the fact, but still).

If you are seeing this, it is because I am still out to dinner and this pre-scheduled thread came up.

I am sure this will fuel rumors that Tunch is actually running the website. That, of course, is absurd, because everyone knows Tunch hates WordPress.

And since I am Tunch is writing this ahead of the time and have no idea what the score is, let me restate how much I hate Dallas.

Conservatives have been flogging the living shit out of a recent piece by Jim Manzi (not the Lotus guy but another Jim Manzi) in National Affairs. Bobo named it one of his essays of the year, and Chunky Bobo devoted a whole column to it.

I was thinking of reading it but, honestly, I just don’t trust conservatives enough to believe that they are reporting economic numbers properly. And I wasn’t impressed with Manzi’s pieces on climate change at NRO (they were pretty reasonable as NRO pieces go, but they weren’t very convincing).

From 1980 through today, America’s share of global output has been constant at about 21%. Europe’s share, meanwhile, has been collapsing in the face of global competition — going from a little less than 40% of global production in the 1970s to about 25% today. Opting for social democracy instead of innovative capitalism, Europe has ceded this share to China (predominantly), India, and the rest of the developing world.

And here’s Kthug:

But as Jonathan Chait quickly pointed out, Manzi’s definition of Europe included the Soviet bloc (!), so that he was attributing to social democracy an economic decline that was mainly about the collapse of communism. Chait also suggested that Manzi wasn’t comparing the same dates for America and Europe; and most importantly, Chait pointed out that to the extent there has been a growth divergence, it’s almost entirely because America has faster population growth; since 1980, real GDP per capita in Western Europe and the US have grown at almost the same rate.

But I went back to Manzi’s source of data, and it turns out that it’s even worse than that. If you use the broad definition of Europe, which includes the USSR, it did indeed have 40 percent of world output in the early 1970s. But that share has not fallen to 25 percent — it’s still above 30 percent.

The only thing I can think is that Manzi compared Europe including the eastern bloc in 1970 with Europe not including the east today.

Fail.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this Douthat gem on an earlier Manzi piece on climate change:

Everyone should read it: Conservatives will find a sensible blueprint for moving from the denialist fringe to the political mainstream, and liberals will get a taste of how a wised-up, heads-out-of-the-sand Right could kick their ass on the issue.

Update. I’m sorry if this sounds a little pissy “ha, ha conservatives suck.” I’m genuinely annoyed that I spent time gearing up to read what I thought might be a legitimately interesting conservative article only to find that it was a fraud.

Update update. Manzi responds here to Jon Chait’s criticism —I haven’t digested the first point Manzi discusses, but I don’t think I agree with the second. Perhaps Manzi will address Krugman’s criticism later.

In any case, not to sound too Andrew Sullivan about this, but it is nice to see a mostly fact-based, fairly reasonable discussion such as this.

I used to like him (as well as Evan Bayh) when I was in full fledged wingnut mode.

That should pretty much seal the deal.

So much fail:

He was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama—a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he said privately.

So at what point does Reid step aside and let someone with a chance run for his seat?

Have at it.

I am in San Francisco Tues thru Sat. Anything cool to eat/drink near the Moscone convention center?

I always go to Yank Sing and Slanted Door. But I know there are lots of other great places nearby.

Update. Thanks for the suggestions. I love osteria del forno and Mr bing. I will try to grab a burrito and try amber.