I seriously considered signing up for Twitter just so I could easily liveblog the vice-presidential debate tonight. But then I'd have to find friends on Twitter or integrate it here or something, and that all sounded like work, so I didn't do it.

But, boy, am I looking forward to it. Listening to Sarah Palin try to answer questions, and listening to Joe Biden try not to beat her too senseless. He's really in a tough spot - if he goes easy on her, it's because he doesn't respect her as a woman. If he's hard on her, he obviously hates women. If he ignores her and focuses on the issues, he's not taking her seriously because she's a woman. There is absolutely nothing he can do that won't get him into trouble.

So I'm just hoping that she self-destructs all on her own. Which I think she'll do. I mean, Saturday Night Live used her actual answers to questions because they couldn't think of anything funnier. On one hand, you have things that Sarah Palin actually said as the candidate for the vice-presidency. On the other hand, you have every other thing that anyone has said or could say. And the things she said were funnier! That is true talent.

A friend pointed out to me earlier today a survey that says that 60% of Americans don't think she's qualified. After tonight, anyone still in that other 40% is just lying to themselves.

When I first heard about the giant "golden parachutes" that were supposed to go to the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - in the neighborhood of $10 million each - I was pretty mad. After the government stepped in to bail them out, we, the taxpayers, were on the hook for these ridiculous firing bonuses. These two men had been in charge of the two companies when it was decided that they couldn't go on without a government bailout - even if they didn't start the practices that led them here, they certainly must have been aware of what was going on.

Now, after their mismanagement and incompetence, taxpayers were going to pay them more than most of us will make in a lifetime.

But then a friend pointed out that we can't pick and chose which employee payments get made when disaster happens. The government has just stepped in and said, "We're renegotiating the employment contracts retroactively because it's too much money".

Partly I'm torn. It is really infuriating that these guys will get so much money for utterly failing at their jobs. It's infuriating that we'll have to pay for it. But it's not the government's place to come in and change the game at this point. Yes, the government is paying some or all of the bills. But if we wanted that sort of control over what happened at Fannie and Freddie, we should have created the Department of Secondary Mortgages. Then the "CEOs" would be appointees and we could make political statements and fire them without resorting to just telling them that the legal contracts they signed are null and void just because we say so.

Would someone please remind CNN again that they report the news, they are not news themselves. This convention is about Barack Obama and the future of our country, not Wolf Blitzer and additional information at CNN.com.

Anyway.

Kind of cool that they've been embedding the commercials inside the border showing the schedule and whatnot, so you can always see the dumb factoids that CNN thinks you should be aware of. We'll be seeing more of this in the future.

What is going on with the news today? I don't usually read mainstream news sources, figuring that if it's important, either someone's blog will mention it, the wife will mention it, or my office-mate will read about it in the Express.

But today, my RSS feed was so devoid of anything interesting that I went to the Washington Post website to see if anything interesting had happened.

Almost the entire front page is dedicated to whatever Obama is going to do tonight, and I just can't get myself to care. I made up my mind long ago that I was voting for him. And at this point, he would pretty much have to tear off his face and reveal himself as a chupacabra or space alien or something to get me to change my mind.

Actually, I would vote for either of those ahead of McCain so long as they promised to try and undo some of the damage to the country that Bush and Co. have done. And listening to the news anchors talk about President Chupacabra would be fun, too.

I think I also can't get interested because I just can't (or maybe won't) imagine how McCain could possibly win. I may be naive. Considering the lukewarm response to his "I forget how many houses I own" remark, coming during the lowest point in the real estate market in my adult lifetime, it's a strong possibility.

Anyway, I suppose we'll watch some of whatever is going on tonight. Maybe it will even be interesting. And maybe tomorrow the news will be back to normal.

WALL-E: Cute robot or liberal propaganda? - ParentDish

"From the first moment of the film," wrote Shannen Coffin, former general counsel to Vice President Cheney, "my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind."

So, Wall-E has been described as "a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment." The cynic in me is wondering if the blogs I read, predominantly pretty liberal, pick up on that, and overstate how good the movie is because it speaks to some of the issues they believe in. That is, it's getting "good movie" points for "good message".

It's only natural to come away with a more positive perception of anything - a movie, a person, a work of art, whatever - if that thing supports views you already hold. I certainly don't mean to imply that the reviewers of Wall-E are being dishonest, even unconsciously. But it's something to think about. Especially if the conservative reviewers consistently have lower opinions of the movie. I guess I'd have to check out some of them to be sure.

Techdirt | Supreme Court Decision On Guns May Cut Promoting Progress Out Of The Constitution

Again, so whether or not you're happy with the way the court decided the Heller case, the fact that it has no problem deciding that a clause in the Constitution can be ignored as "preamble" could have very bad consequences for those of us pointing out that dangerous innovation-hindering intellectual property systems are against the Constitution.

A lot has been said about the Supreme Court's decision that the DC gun ban is unconstitutional, but this is the first time I've heard mention of the effects that this precedent might have on other legislation.

I don't much like guns in the house. I don't want them in my house. I don't think you should have them in your house, either, but I think you should have a right to have them if you want to. And I don't think the repeal of the gun ban is going to have a significant effect on the number of guns in the city.

My feeling on the constitutionality of the law is that it probably wasn't. As written, I think you can make a strong argument that the amendment doesn't say that everyone should be allowed to have a gun. However, it has been interpreted for years to say that it does. Unless we amend the amendment, I think we have to allow people to posses guns. I think we should amend it - not necessarily to ban guns, but to remove the controversy. It should be very clear what the amendment does and doesn't allow. We've been arguing over it long enough. I'm not sure I'd be happy with what the present political climate in the federal government would come up with, though, so maybe we should wait until things are a little more sane.

In any event, I hope this doesn't open the floodgates to picking and choosing which parts of the Constitution are relevant and which aren't. Awful intellectual property laws are bad, but there are a lot of other parts of the Constitution that we'd all be even sorrier to be without.

DSC_2028, Originally uploaded by Barack Obama

It's nice to see Hillary finally putting the party and her country before herself.

I'm just kidding. I'm finding it difficult to be annoyed with her at this point - she lost, and now she's helping Obama, because that's what you do when you finish second in a really close and strongly contested race. She's very capable, and she's very smart, and I think she can be a great asset to the Obama campaign. I'm just glad she's not going to be President.

By the way, if you're not friends with Obama on Flickr, you're a total loser.

A friend pointed out that I not only got a picture of the Pope, but the gentleman (And I use that term loosely) accompanying him is none other than our fearless leader, President Bush. Laura Bush is just a few steps behind.

You can see the large size here.

So that's pretty cool.

So, I'm trying to think of something I want to write about rather than rehash yesterday's Orioles game. No one wants to hear about it - O's fans will just get depressed, and the Rays don't have any fans. Maybe the players' mothers. Anyway.

So I thought I might write about Quacker of the House Nancy Pelosi advising the President to boycott the Olympic opening ceremonies to protest China's all-around unpleasantness, but then I was reading the article and my eyes started to glaze over. No one cares what advice Nancy Pelosi has for President Bush. She'd be more likely to get a reaction out of a large rock.

Then I thought I should say something about IBM's temporary suspension from getting federal contracts for some horrendous thing they did to EPA that no one will explain. This is huge news, but until we get some more details, it isn't all that interesting. Or maybe it's not interesting because my mind is refusing to grasp the massive incompetence or malice necessary to actually be disciplined by the government at all.

But really, the most exciting thing about today is that I plan to go meet Charles Stross at the Brickskeller tonight. He's one of my favorite authors, and he's in town for something or other. He claims he's trying to fend off jet-lag, but anyone going to a place with a beer list like this is merely fending off sobriety.

Nats 3, Braves 2

What a heck of a way to break in the new stadium. I don't think anyone could have scripted a better first game at Nationals Park. Cristian Guzman singled on the first pitch a Nationals player saw in the new park. The Nats scored two runs in their first inning. And then Nats golden boy Ryan Zimmerman hit a walk-off home run to win it in the bottom of the ninth. Never mind that the home run was just about the only ball any National hit hard all night, it was still a great win.

And, perhaps more surprising, George W. Bush hung out in the announcer's booth for a few innings after throwing out the first pitch, and actually sounded like a human being. He didn't talk about terrorism, even when they brought up 9/11. He joked with the announcers, and just generally talked like a baseball fan.

I wonder what would have happened (Bear with me here, I know this is a stretch) if he had become MLB Commissioner instead of the President of the US. First, it would save us from Bud Selig, who, despite his recent minor victories in the steroid battle, is still a schmuck and not good for the game.

Second, I think many of Bush's qualities that I hate in a President, I would love in a commissioner.

I'd be fine with a preemptive strike into Florida (Or Baltimore) to bring about regime change before another Marlins fire sale.

I'd be fine with tax cuts for the richest teams - I think these revenue sharing deals are dumb. if the Yankees and the Red Sox want to have payrolls that are twenty times that of anyone else, let them. The A's and sometimes the Marlins have proven you don't need to spend that much to compete, so poor teams shouldn't be getting handouts.

I'd be fine with the commissioner acting as if he were endowed by god with infallibility. The commissioner is supposed to be the final word, and while there are issues on which I disagree with god on how to run a country, I'm pretty sure I'm cool with the way god would run baseball (I'll bet he'd raise the mound a little bit and abolish Coors Field, for example).

As baseball commissioner, Bush wouldn't be in control of the military, so there would be no waterboarding of Jose Canseco, as much as many people might like to see it.

We would still have to deal with the pro-Texas bias, but I think that's a small price to pay. Too bad no one thought of this about ten years ago.