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Was Palin connected with the John Birch Society? Interesting, but at Where’s long? Right instead of left: McCain chose before shaking hands with the moderator at the end of the transfer the wrong direction. point, somewhat gratuitous investigation.
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McCain Loses Hastily Convened Fourth Presidential Debate With Lifesize Cardboard Obama | DagBlog.comThis is the sort of thing Barack and Joe have been emailing about–it’s a little early for celebratory Onion-style pieces about the Dems’ lead in the polls. (Of course, after chiding the base, I bet Barack and Joe are laughing their asses off–this is really funny.)
Day: October 17, 2008
Follow-up: Intrade confirms artificial inflation of McCain trading
I don’t know if Erik‘s seen this, but I found this report on Talking Points Memo interesting. Apparently Intrade’s internal investigation confirms that someone is artificially inflating the value of McCain (that is, the probability that he’ll win in November) by dumping huge amounts of money into the market in an irrational fashion. The CQ article says that it’s a single “institutional” member of Intrade and that they’ve been in contact with the investor, but that there’s no evidence that the rules of the exchange were violated.
I guess what this proves is that:
- Intrade is small enough to be manipulated, if you have a little spare change, and therefore its predictions aren’t trustworthy. Double-check any important prodictions with the Iowa Electronic Market and Betfair.
- There are McCain supporters out there who are willing to spend, and lose, large amounts of money to influence an outlying marker of the campaign’s success.
Shannon Worrell’s The Honey Guide is released
Looks like The Honey Guide dropped a little early. I happened to search for Shannon Worrell on iTunes last night and the album was already there; her MySpace page said it wouldn’t be available until this morning.
I’m listening now and it’s pretty wonderful. I’d listen to her sing the phone book, I think–her voice is that mesmerizing–and it’s nice to hear the voice again. The rest of it is deceptive. There’s more open space in the arrangements–quite a few of her old tunes were all vocal, all the time, and the very first track features an extended instrumental break–but there are more musicians in her band, I think, than ever before. It sounds like country, but that’s mostly the pedal steel–there are the same tight sinews underneath that powered her September 67 songs. And then there are the songs that are out of a different tradition: the echo, shuffling drums, and organ of “If I Can Make You Cry” feel like they came from somewhere unstuck in time near Louisiana. “Sweet Like You” is intimate and dreamlike.
But the lyrics. As always, Shannon’s songs are drenched in images, but where on Three Wishes she was tapping Greek myth and children’s TV, here the songs are swaddled in something simultaneously more personal and a little closer to Greil Marcus’s “old weird America.” The narrator of “Sweet Like You” wants to set her love floating down the James River. Kitchen tables rise and fly. Giant stars are removed from mountaintops. And lovers call from countryside bars because the bartender took their keys.
The Honey Guide is better than a note from an old friend: it’s a letter from a strange place. In its deepest waters it feels like a warmer version of Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood; in other places it feels like afternoon by a fire. Highly recommended.