Slumdog Millionaire

I don't want to give too much away, but if you haven't seen this movie, you really should. It's sorta Reservoir Dogs meets Sleepless in Seattle. It punched all my buttons: the life as grit and adrenaline from the guy who did Trainspotting and 28 Days Later button, the magical realism of Amelie button, and the great fantasy of a deterministic universe button, depressed and held.



JEK
Has three buttons

Define "Improbable"

There was certainly a time when I would have considered the work presented by the Improbable Research collective to be the stuff of great whim and fancy. And many of you still may. Having spent the last year and a half in pursuit of the movement of a cation the mere existence of which has me a little skeptical, though, this sort of thing seems like utterly reasonable science to me.





JEK
Not exactly probable himself

Not Safe for PETA

Best. Background. Ever.

Unless you are a turkey or a lover thereof.



JEK
Lover of inadvertent metaphors.

Loserman wins

It would be really awesome if someone could explain to me why letting Joe Lieberman keep his position as Chair of the Homeland Security committee is a good idea. Why? Here are some reasons that do not seem to make adequate sense:

1. The Dems think that they will get to 60 seats (including independents), and will thus have a filibuster-proof majority...but only with Lieberman on board. This would make sense if the Democrats' voting behavior was more like trained circus cattle and less like my cats when it's time to go to the vet. They just don't vote as a block, and on the most important issues of the day, they're more likely to get the vote of Collins or Snow than they are Lieberman.

2. He's done such a great job at Homeland Security that they can't afford to lose him. This is pretty clearly not the case.

3. They're worried about losing hawkish Jews. Two words ablate that issue: Rahm Emmanuel.

4. This is no time for infighting among Democrats. You know what was really not a good time for infighting among Democrats? The election.

I think this guy should be tossed from the Committee at least, if not the caucus, but am eager for dissenting views.


JEK
Holds grudges

Some E-cards

Are good.

Others are bad.

These ones are good. And are linked on the right.

JEK
Always in search of a snarky message

Nate Silver

If you were like me over the past few months, you spent a lot of time at FiveThirtyEight.com. That site was made by a guy named Nate Silver, who's a great example of what the University of Chicago can do to a mind.

Nate created 538 on a whim, applying his baseball stats skills to the election. Like us, he was interested in the election and its analysis. Like us, he liked Obama. Like us, he started a blog. Let's raise a glass to him, for having started in the same place and ended in the New York Times (etc.)

JEK
Strongly believes in learning by example

Newsweek

I'm totally sucked into the behind the scenes series on Newsweek. A group of reporters were given "exclusive behind-the-scenes" access to the Obama and McCain campaigns "on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day."

POHS

T.F.B.

Change.gov

The Obama/Biden Transition team has the best named website around:

change.gov

It's worth perusing for many reasons. Here are three.

One: it's just a nicely designed site.

Two: it has all sorts of little indicators of the way this administration is going to be run, such as a flow chart of the executive branch that puts it UNDER the constitution and includes the Office of the Vice President.

Three: it's got a link where you can apply for a job with the administration. And my personal feeling is that if you believe in these people, and more importantly you believe in what these people stand for, then you should apply and see what happens. You should give them the chance to refuse you. This is not difficult -- the form is very short.

JEK
Filled out the short form.

The end of the beginning, and the beginning of the middle.

I'm still looking for the right language to describe the sense of victory/joy/success/affirmation/realignment/booyah to capture my feelings about the country and its choice of President a few days ago.

So this post will be short on that language.

But I do think it's important to chart the journey of Nation Indivisible over the past few months, and look at how my own thinking has been shaped by this blog, and others, since our first post in January.

This is the 105th post to the blog since that time, for an average of about one post every three days. That's about half of my ideal, and about ten times what I thought would ever happen. POHS and DMW have committed themselves to this idea and have always challenged me to come up with something to top their inventive, entertaining, and always perspicacious posts, and that teamwork is certainly at the root of our continued success at growing Nation Indivisible.

CTL, who as of yet hasn't posted to the blog (or even commented on it publicly), recently assured me that she reads it, and that we should keep going with it, and that's a huge help, too.

Looking back at the first entry, I remember the cold night in Concord when, warmed by the promise of an America driven by hope rather than fear, I started this blog. Or, more accurately, took this blog out of my head, where it had been regularly updating since November 2000, and made it slightly more tangible. I remember thinking about how wonderful it would be to see a country united again; a country that shared a sense of a brighter future; a country that got a little better every day. And, yes, it seemed like Barack Obama would be a good president, too, but this, for me, has always been less about Obama the man, and more about Obama the movement -- about people emerging from the politics of fear and choosing the politics of hope. That's not about one man, or one moment. That's about our national character and it's ability to shake off the last eight years of misdirection. And when we did that on Tuesday, I was the happiest I've ever been.

Now, certainly, that's mostly because so far I haven't done the really happy things: I haven't been engaged, or married, or had a child. So national pride can still register on my scale. But even so, I was surprised by the strength of my emotion, by the depth of my patriotism, and by the real sense of belonging to something greater than myself that I felt on that warm Tuesday night, just watching television with good friends.

To be sure, most of that something greater was a sense of kinship with this nation indivisible. But a good measure was a sense of having shared a more specific journey with some people who, though I've never met them, were my regular companions -- often for hours every day -- throughout this process. They're all linked over on the right: Josh Marshall and Greg Sargent at talkingpointsmemo.com, Nate and Sean at fivethirtyeight.com, Andrew Sullivan...they all helped me to shape my own ideas about this race with commentary that ran in almost real time, almost 24 hours a day. We crow about our 105 posts in a year -- these guys were getting close to that in a week (or, in Andrew Sullivan's case, a day). We're amateurs, they're pros, and the difference is clear.

Still, in the coming months, I hope that Nation Indivisible continues to provide it's unique voice to this new America. I hope that we are able to increasingly move from showing you what we're watching, to telling you what we're thinking, to describing how we're translating those thoughts into concrete action. Because if there is one thing that Tuesday made plain to me, it's that just watching, while sometimes very, very good, isn't good enough.

JEK
2.0

Yes We Did.

Now the real work begins.

JEK
Born again

Michelle

So, much to say it's overwhelming. I wont even attempt to sum it up right now.

Instead, here's a nice article about Michelle from the Times of London.

Who would you like to share a Martini with? The answer of course... Michelle. (Barack could maybe make himself useful by popping out for some crisps.)

POHS
also good at popping out for crisps

Best of luck to all of us

Listening to Obama in Cleveland...

POHS