Do you want Obama to be a candidate of change? If so, how do you feel about the non-stop obstructionist tactics of conservatives?

Great rundown of what the GOP's strategy is toward Obama and the Democrats. Pretty much sums everything up, except for the most important thing -- how to effectively fight back.

Thanks Uncle Fester. I was thinking of laying out a list of right-wing contribution scandals like Readerreader asked, but then I'd just be taking his bait to mis-direct the entire discussion, when the real discussion is supposed to be about Obama's education speech. Readerreader doesn't really have any argument about the main point, so he has to try to swing the conversation to some stale unrelated crap.

What I want Readerreader to do is apply the principles evenly. For example, here we have him claiming that Obama can't be trusted because of the Rezko dealings, and therefore Obama shouldn't talk to kids about education. Or something. (And nevermind that Obama was never accused of any wrongdoing, admitted his mistake in letting the friendship continue, and donated something like $150,000 in Rezko-linked contributions to charity.)

If that's really R2's argument, then I want him to pledge to attack Republicans in an equal manner. If George Bush buys a crappy baseball team for $86 million and then sells it for $250 million, solely due to his father's Texas connections, then I want Readerreader to be all over that, claiming that henceforth Bush had no right to address schoolchildren about anything.

Let's hear R2 take swipes at John McCain for accepting contributions from foreigners, or Hillary Clinton's links to a corrupt Chinese contributor. (And didn't Mark Sanford accept contributions from a cockfighting group? Interesting...)

R2 did nothing but defend Sarah Palin's $150,000 (or whatever the tally was) in clothing expenditure, nor did he have much to say about Ted Stevens' windfall of $250,000 in free house renovations from a company he helped.

What about Tom DeLay's network of corporate contributions in violation of Texas campaign laws? We're talking about millions of dollars here.

Then there are the not millions, but billions of dollars that flowed through Dick Cheney's Halliburton and KBR companies, with a revolving door of kickbacks between Pentagon officials and defense-company contractors. Readerreader was strangely silent on that one as well.

The idea of a comedy about a person who thinks up crossword puzzles for a living isn't bad. Sounds like they simply couldn't pull it off -- it was a Sunday Times crossword when they thought it would be a Tuesday.

For a really good movie about crossword people, rent "Crossword" (I believe), which documents a national crossword-solving competition and the participants, as well as featuring interviews with celebrities (like Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart) who love doing crosswords and crossword makers (like NYT's Will Shortz).

I still can't get over the way that movie ends... This one underdog is about to nail it, and then he chokes. Oh, the pain.

I caught it on the opening weekend, in the only theater in town showing it. There were hardly any newspaper ads, let alone TV ads, and I chose to see it solely on the fact of it being a live-action Mike Judge movie.

There were a handful of other people in the audience, and as a result the movie closed after two weeks. I thought it was the funniest thing I'd seen in years, from the guy in traffic who changes lanes only to get stuck (and passed by a pedestrian with a walker), to the chirpy receptionist who answers her calls with the same metronomic phrase, to the overweight hypnotist whose final suggestions are locked in the protagonist's mind, to the workers who finally beat the hell out of a printer that never works right.

I identified with way too many things in the movie: The suburban box-building, cubicle-maze workplaces (I used to work at America Online), the girlfriend who others can actually identify (correctly) as the type who would cheat on you, the smoothly insidious boss, the hell of corporate "fun" restaurant chains, the desperation of a workaday life removed from its reason for living...

So of course I told a few of my friends "Office Space" was hilarious and great. They went out of their way to rent it. Their response: "That wasn't funny at all!"

From yesterday's New York Times article:

-- “The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,” said Brett Curtiss, an engineer from Pearland, Tex., who said he would keep his three children home. “I don’t want our schools turned over to some socialist movement.”

-- The Republican Party chairman in Florida, Jim Greer, said he “was appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology.”

Oh, the irony of calling a speech socialist, when having a public-education system at all is by definition socialist -- and hardly a bad thing.

People don't even know what the word socialism means. They think it's a gateway drug to communism, yet they haven't a clue that public education is the backbone of U.S. society (and by extension, the country's competitiveness in the global workforce).