Playing catch-up | Michael Tomasky

Hi gang, sorry for the delay today. We had to take the kid to the doctors' this morning, so I was not able to start my day the usual way, which is scanning the news around 6:30 am and getting up a post or two in the morning. Everything is fine, by the way, thanks.

So let's catch up on the day's events. First, the hoot of the day is the ridiculous Daily Caller headline trying to blame last year's uptick in pedestrian deaths on Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign. The idea here is that the first lady has sent more people out there walking, so more are dying.

I'm pretty sure the DC, which obviously takes some pride in writing obscenely over-the-top headlines, did this one just to goad liberals into being outraged, so I won't take the bait. Who knows, maybe they're right about the connection. Come on, Tucker, let's you and me go out cruising one night and brush past overweight pedestrians. Teach 'em a lesson, out there trying to lose weight on the Kenyan-socialist plan.

Item two: She's running:

"Have there been informal conversations between supporters on the ground in Iowa and with the PAC? Of course there have," SarahPAC Treasurer Tim Crawford told POLITICO.

"Do we have supporters all across the nation? Yes," he continued. "Do we have supporters in Iowa? Yes. Do those supporters want Sarah Palin to run for higher office? Yes, of course they do."

That catechismic sentence structure is always a dead giveaway. I really dislike it and wish people would stop talking like that. Do I ever lapse into it? Occasionally, sure. And what am I hoping to convey when I do? That I'm saying something without really saying it, if you get my drift.

It would seem to me that she has to do something before she announces to try to fix some of the post-Arizona damage. Or maybe she doesn't even think that way and doesn't see it as damage at all.

Item three: I read today that the Democratic convention for 2012 is likely going to be held in either St. Louis or Charlotte, North Carolina. St. Louis has been the front-runner but Claire McAskill is getting nervous that St. Loo hasn't been named yet.

They're both good picks, and, building on the Denver location last time, they mark the firm arrival of the end of the era of Democrats hugging the coasts (Chicago being the only exception). Looking back, can you believe the Democrats held back to back conventions in New York City, in 1976 and 1980? And at a time when NYC was at its absolute lowest point: The foul and filthy city of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and porn theater marquees blaring "Four Erections!" at passersby? And then they returned there again in 1992?

Item four: I want to leave most of the China discussion to the Guardian's redoubtable diplomatic staff, but I think Yglesias makes a point here that isn't made often enough in all the stories about how China is taking over everything:

China is a dynamo and Greece is a basket case, but Greece is much richer than China. Rapid Chinese progress does in part reflects the skill and wisdom of Chinese policymakers. But in large part it merely reflects the madness of a previous generation of Chinese policymakers—the people who left the country at such a low level in 1980 from which it's so rapidly been growing. If you look at the economic success of Chinese people in Taiwan or Hong Kong or Singapore or diaspora communities around the world, the striking thing about the PRC is how poor it still is.

I read a few weeks ago that the number of Chinese we'd call middle class by our standards is infinitesimal, like 50 million people or something. I'm sure in some ways the regime likes it this way because once they have a truly broad middle class, then it's only a matter of time before their political system will have to change, I think. The more poor people, the more authoritarian they can get away with being.

Item five: Piers Morgan's debut on CNN came away with high ratings. But what I want to know is, are there any Americans employed on British television in this manner? I mean, our prime time is littered with speakers of the king's English, from Simon Cowell (okay, he's not there anymore, but was for years) to all these Cowell imitators, and now Morgan, and Jamie Oliver and who knows who else. David McCallum.

Does this work in reverse? Why not? I really don't understand it at all. Do you think I could host a British television show, with my charming Yank accent and dapper West Virginia ways? I'd move the whole mespoche there if someone offered me a show.

US politicsMichael Tomasky
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