Over the course of an election season, presidential candidates must get their hair cut at least, what, a handful of times.

Working backward:

• American popular opinion is driven by the media.
• The media is dominated by image.
• A candidate’s appearance is their primary image.
• A candidate’s appearance is, briefly, under the complete control of the person who cuts their hair.

Somewhere in America are a handful of men and women, holding scissors and shears, that could single-handedly reshape the American political landscape in under two seconds without the use of a weapon.

From the Washington Post:

The potential for superdelegates to play a critical role has some party leaders worried that the situation could lend the appearance that the nominee will be selected by insiders rather than by rank-and-file voters.

“Could lend the appearance”, eh? Damn straight it could lend the appearance. One might even say that is exactly what would happen.

I’m getting real nervous this is turning into a train wreck.

Good call on moving your primaries earlier! Not like those loser states that vote after Super Tuesday. Those states don’t even matter. Suckers.

No longer allowed: calling theater “the work”.

As in, “I know you’re having a rough day, but it’s time to leave the baggage at the rehearsal room door…let’s stay focused on the work, okay?”

It’s just pretentious. The only reason you do it is because you’re unsure that what you’re doing qualifies as work. Look, I know it sucks when other people don’t take you seriously. But that’s their problem, not yours. Stop overcompensating. No one else calls their work “the work”. It’s a feeble form of insecure navel-gazing, dressed up to look tough: “I really am working hard! See? It’s even called work!”

Plus, it’s generic and vague. If you can’t name what you’re doing more specifically than that, do you actually know what you’re doing?

Okay, I know I’m supposed to be cynical about these sorts of things, but this is pretty cool:

Dear PayPal,

I am trying to set up an account. But your system will not allow me to set up an account with my own name.

You have a record of a transaction that my wife made, and apparently since we share the same address you assume that any account coming from this address will be for her.

So when I try to create an account it requires that I confirm that previous transaction, but if I confirm that transaction you IGNORE the name that I provided for the account and use my wife’s name instead. And then I cannot change the name on the account after it is made.

How can I set up an account for me, under my name? Presumably I do not have to move to a separate house from my wife to be able to do this??

Although I have enough experience with your miserable support system to know that this email will probably be ignored entirely OR that you will eventually answer a DIFFERENT question that I did not ask after a long period of first ignoring me, nevertheless,

Thanks in advance,
Chris

2008-02-04 EDITED TO ADD: Yup. They just ignored me entirely.

I’ve decided to start cataloguing some things I want to do.

First installment: the Doorknob Door.

I believe the next four weeks may be the single most important factor in next year’s presidential election. Our presidential candidates, hitherto suspended in the country’s most ridiculously protracted presidential lead-up, are about to lay their chips down for reals. And it’s the big money chips. Especially for the Democrats.

So if you care about what’s about to happen—and what’s about to happen is going to be enormous one way or another—then it’s time to consider what you will do, if anything, in the next four weeks.

I’ve said before I’m a fan of Obama. That conviction grows daily. Today it took another leap forward when I read Frank Rich’s analyis of Obama and Clinton.

Mr. Obama’s much-derided readiness to talk promptly and directly to the leaders of Iran and Syria, for instance, was a clear alternative, agree with it or not, to Mrs. Clinton’s same-old Foggy Bottom platitudes on the subject. His supposedly reckless pledge to chase down Osama bin Laden and his gang in Pakistan, without Pakistani permission if necessary, was a pointed rebuke of both Mrs. Clinton’s and President Bush’s misplaced fealty to our terrorist-enabling “ally,” Pervez Musharraf. Like Mr. Obama’s prescient Iraq speech of 2002, his open acknowledgment of the Pakistan president’s slipperiness turned out to be ahead of the curve.

He also has some insightful things to say about just how bad things might get if we set this election up as another Holy War between Blue and Red for the sliver of independents:

The unspoken truth is that the Clinton machine is not being battle-tested at all by the Democratic primary process. […] In reality, neither Mr. Edwards nor any other Democratic competitor will ever hit her with the real, personal mud being stockpiled by the right. But if she’s getting a bye now, she will not from the Republican standard-bearer, whoever he may be. Clinton-bashing is the last shared article of faith (and last area of indisputable G.O.P. competence) that could yet unite the fractured and dispirited conservative electorate.

The Republicans know this and are so psychologically invested in refighting the Clinton wars that they’re giddy. Karl Rove’s first column for Newsweek last week, “How to Beat Hillary (Next) November,” proceeded from the premise that her nomination was a done deal.

To which I say: please, no. Please let’s not start this again. But then Rich points out:

Peggy Noonan wasn’t being tongue-in-cheek when she wondered in The Wall Street Journal last month whether Mr. Obama “understands the kind of quiet cheering he is beginning to garner from some Republicans.” In her view “they see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sickness.”

Yes. More of that please. More real leadership. Less battling-it-out-for-just-enough-votes-to-make-it-into-office-and-then-flip-the-bird-to-the-other-side-for-the-next-four-years.

If you approve of subtlety in politics, of new thinking, of a focus on shared problems and opportunities to solve them cooperatively, if you think the United States may want some friends in the world, if you’d like the President to talk to you as if you were an intelligent human being, if you’d like some confidence that the head honcho is inquisitive, clear, persuasive, hopeful, pragmatic, electrifying, and deeply intelligent….

You’ve got about four weeks to do something about it.

Hint: it’s not on the Wii.

I played this as a kid, except all the motion was in my head:

Utterly cool.

(Really, I used to fill up sheets of paper with frozen-in-time contraptions that funneled a ball around the paper into a goal. But turning that into a video game? Stroke of genius.)

On November 1st, Bruce Schneier published his essay “The War on the Unexpected“. It made the rounds online, and it well deserved the attention. I won’t start copying in bits and pieces of that text, because you really owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. 

I didn’t link to the essay at the time, but I sure as hell am now. Why now? Maybe it was all those idiotic “Terror Tips? Report Suspicious Activity” highway signs I saw this Thanksgiving. Or maybe it was Schneier’s followup post where he describes a man in the UK who “had gone into a diabetic coma on a bus” and therefore “was shot twice with a Taser gun by police who feared he may have been a security threat.” I have a loved one with type 1 diabetes, and that just makes my blood boil. 

This is just f&!king unacceptable, people. Schneier is right: fear is winning. Refuse to be terrorized.

I’ll end this on a positive note. My sister recently sent me a link to the interview with Barack Obama at Google. After watching it, I went and sent the guy some money. I love this guy. He gets it. He gets that a culture of fear is not acceptable. And he gets a lot of other things too. He’s genuine, he’s wicked smart, and he gets my vote.