Can a Republican win in Massachusetts?

If so, this is how they can do it. It's a long shot, but there's a lesson to be learned here about campaigning in the Web age.

Best Movies of the Aughts

Top 10 (in no particular order):

The Dark Knight - The film of the decade. Captures better than any mainstream film fear in the face of terrorism. It's a graphic novel "Silence of the Lambs," with a villain to match. Heath Ledger gave the performance of his too-brief career, and Christopher Nolan topped off the best decade of any aughts director.

Almost Famous - Cameron Crowe's best film won him a writing Oscar and a supporting actress statue for Kate Hudson, who's nothing since. It also featured a career-best performance by Billy Crudup, who has done plenty since. A love letter to music and the best teenage job ever.

City of God - It's been compared to Goodfellas, perhaps the best film of the 90s, and for good reason. A much grittier look at street life than the shiny "Slumdog Millionaire," it's chilling and breathtaking in its unwavering glimpse of life in Rio's slums.

Ratatouille - The representative for a flat out unfathomable decade by the best studio in Hollywood history (more on that in a minute). Its climatic scene, and Ego's review of Remy's dish, is perfectly written and animated. A joy.

Lost in Translation - Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanson bring a transient kinship, a temporary friendship and a chaste May-December romance to life. Two lost souls find each other for just a moment, and it's magical.

There Will Be Blood - The performance of the decade from Daniel Day Lewis, who followed his brilliant turn in the uneven "Gangs of New York" with this masterpiece. Paul Thomas Anderson, working about as far from the great "Boogie Nights" as he could, was no less capable of delivering a twisted look at the American Dream in the West decades earlier.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - The best of Charlie Kaufman's work, which is saying something given "Adaptation" and "Being John Malcovich." Also the best work of an incredible decade from Kate Winslet, who should have won her Oscar for this. A heartbreaking story about the link between love and our memories of it, and each other.

25th Hour - Spike Lee delivers his best work as a director by leaving the writing to somebody else. The cast is uniformly great, with Edward Norton more than ably supported by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Anna Paquin and Brian Cox, all at the top of their game. Doubles as a Woody Allen-esque love letter to New York, at a time when the city needed it more than ever.

The Prestige - Christopher Nolan again, who made five movies this decade, four exceptional (The Dark Knight, The Prestige, Memento and Batman Begins) and one merely good (Insomnia). Christian Bale plays the Deniro to Nolan's Scorcese, turning in a tricky performance that hits every note. Michael Cane, another Nolan favorite, adds a high point to a ridiculous IMDB page. The ending proves the final, and best, trick of a movie full of magic.

Tropic Thunder - Narrowly edges out "Anchorman" for funniest movie of the decade. Robert Downey Jr. (who also did great work in "Iron Man" and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and "Wonder Boys") steals the movie, and an unrecognizable Tom Cruise delivers every time he's on screen.

Honorable Mention: The Bourne movies (best trilogy of the decade), Casino Royale (Best Bond ever?), Royal Tennenbaums (Wes Anderson hasn't been this good since), Before Sunset (just as good as "Before Sunrise") Thank You for Smoking (satire sharp enough to draw blood), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (transcended the rest of a surprisingly satisfying series), High Fidelity (about as good as a book adaptation can get), Once (the decade's best musical), Up (the earliest I've ever cried in a movie; 15 minutes in, tears exploded from my eyes), The Incredibles (subversive in all the right ways) Finding Nemo (and Monsters Inc., and Cars, and Wall-E and Cars; Pixar has yet to produce a bad film, the best streak ever)

Best of the Aughts

Everybody else is doing it, so why not me? It's list time. Separate posts coming for TV and films.

10 Best Albums:

I listened to less music as the decade wore on, but there's still a few I love.

My Morning Jacket - Live at Bonnaroo (Not released, but available at the link) - Best live album of the decade.

Boys and Girls in America - The Hold Steady - Name checks my favorite book in the first line, and then gets better.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - Wilco - Brilliant. Heard most of it live July 24, 2002, and it was awesome.

Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker - I could throw superlatives at it, but know this: I listened to this more than any other album this decade.

Kings of Leon - Only by the Night - Could easily have been Youth and Young Manhood, because both were great.

OutKast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below - It's so much more than "Hey Ya!"

U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind - When they became the biggest band in the world again.

Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around - If for no other reason, and there are several, "Hurt."

Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head - It's fashionable to hate, but "Clocks" is undeniable.

White Stripes - Elephant - The decade's best guitar solo: "Ball and Biscuit."

The return

Finals and Christmas are over, and better left behind, so it's time to blog again. Can we get to half a dozen by the end of Christmas break? One down, five to go.

"Welcome to Government Healthcare"

(Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

On Sept. 13, Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, said:

We are on track to have an ample supply rolling out by mid-October, but we may have some early vaccine as early as the first full week in October.

By my count, this would be the last week of October. Good luck finding a shot. And that line in the photo above? That's our future. Can't wait.

(h/t Instapundit)

UPDATE: Here's a gem in a statement from the president (via The Washington Examiner):

The foundation of our national approach to the H1N1 flu has been preparedness at all levels.

Um, yeah.

A Time For Choosing

My favorite political speech. I post it for two reasons:
1) For my buddy Steve.
2) Because it's always worth listening to again. It's 45 years old. If you take out a few of the dated references and change the names, it's as applicable today as it was then.

"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ash heap of totalitarianism."

How sweet it is

The Phillies, for the second year in a row, are National League champions. If somebody told me that would happen two years ago, I would have laughed, then cried. That Pedro Martinez is involved: priceless.

The Market Provides

I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, and stories like this one from yesterday (behind a pay wall) remind me why. The jist is that companies are seeing huge growth in India by providing the hundreds of millions of poor people there with cheap goods, such as tiny $2,200 cars and $70 refrigerators that run on batteries. There's a wood burning stove that gets hotter but produces less smoke for the low low price of $23. Maybe the coolest is a smartphone that doubles as a portable bank branch to serve dozens for $200.

Such inventions represent a fundamental shift in the global order of innovation. Until recently, the West served rich consumers and then let its products and technology filter down to poorer countries. Now, with the developed world mired in a slump and the developing world still growing quickly, companies are focusing on how to innovate, and profit, by going straight to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. They are taking advantage of cheap research and development and low-cost manufacturing to innovate for a market that's grown large enough and sophisticated enough to make it worthwhile.

Read the whole thing, which serves as a reminder that capitalism has done more than any other ism, by a increasingly wide margin, to help improve the living conditions of all people, especially the poor. Remember that the next time some politician talks about government is going to help the poor.

When people say we need more regulations ...

They should read this story from USA Today. Banks are going to start charging fees to people for paying their credit card bills on time. Crazy, right? Why would they do that?

These fees are the credit card industry's response to credit card legislation that will, among other things, restrict credit card issuers' ability to raise interest rates on existing balances. Credit card issuers are looking for ways to raise income before the new rules take effect in February. During the first quarter, 27% of credit card offers included annual fees, up from 18% a year earlier, according to Synovate Mail Monitor, a credit card direct-mail tracking service.

Curtis Arnold, founder of CardRatings.com, says he expected credit card issuers to raise annual fees after the legislation was enacted. What he didn't expect, he says, "was that good customers were going to be hit."

Among the many problems with regulations is unintended consequences. In this case, Congress passed a bill to "help" credit card users which has, in short order, hurt those users who are most responsible.

Increasing regulation is like trying to change the path of a river; the water's going to go where it wants to go.

(h/t the invaluable Cafe Hayek)

What journalists miss

Matt Thompson writes that the media misses three of the four aspects of any big, long-running story.

I particularly agree with number 1 (missing: how we got here and what we know) and number 2 (missing: how journalists know what they know) which makes a recent journalistic trend so troubling. Newsgathering operations, in their ongoing and seemingly never-ending cost-cutting, have shifted away from actually gathering news, which is expensive, to opining on the issues of the day, which is cheap. Most have not been so blatant as Newsweek in this shift, but make no mistake: it's happened.

The reason cited for that shift (cost rarely is) is always some form of the need to compete with the Internet, which newspaper people speak of as some amorphus blob that occasionally becomes sentient. But the ready availability of opinion on the Internet is exactly why the mainstream media should go the other way. In olden days, the media reported about things only it really had access to. Companies and candidates weren't sending press releases to everyday folks, and commission and council meetings were ill-attended except for the most ardently involved.

Both of those examples is no longer the case, thanks to that amorphus sentient blob. Average everyday people (read: former newspaper readers) can now opt in for free to information from almost any entity. Just as importantly, the choice is theirs.

The technology makes organizing people substially more efficient, as Clay Shirky outlines in "Here Comes Everybody." The combination of more interested audiences (they opted in, remember) with easier organizing capabilities have caused an explosion of passionate advocacy. Choose an issue and you can become quickly awash with essays, blog posts, video and podcasts of every aspect from every angle.

Newspapers can't compete with that. What newspapers can provide is a disintested arbiter, substantiating facts and differentiating them from areas where legitimate disagreement remains.

Instead we get things like the above Newsweek cover (h/t Pajamas Media). And they wonder why we complain about bias in the media.

The missing piece of health care reform is ...

Prices.

No change in policy will improve health care nearly as much as reintroducing prices for valuation of treatment.

Most people:

A) have severely limited or no real choice about their health insurance. In the majority of cases they either take what their employer gives them, or get to choose from between two or three levels of coverage from the same company. And the insurance companies face state walls, meaning that I as a Kentuckian can't buy coverage from say,

B) Have a dim grasp, if at all, of how much insurance costs. I'd be willing to wager that most people would have to study their paycheck stub to tell you what they pay for health insurance (unless, of course, they pay nothing), much less the size of the company's (almost always) larger share (about 4/5).

C) Have a dim grasp, if at all, of how much medical treatment costs. Because they have insurance, either publicly (more than a quarter of the population are insured through government programs, not to mention the millions whose employer is the government) or privately, are rarely ask to directly pay for procedures.

No one can really tell you what the market value of any medical treatment is because of these, and other, market distortions. What history shows, again and again across any range of circumstances, is the introduction of prices to indicate value drives down costs and drives up quality.

Some would say we should all have the same coverage, with "health care equality" being a buzzword. But we readily accept less than equality in other areas just as important. In fact, we welcome it.

Everytime I want to buy an apple, I have to decide where I want to buy it, because I have choices. It's probably cheapest at Wal-Mart and best from the Farmer's Market, but somewhere in between at Whole Foods. But Wal-Mart's fartrher than I want to go, and the Farmer's Market is somewhere different everyday. So I way the price, quality and time required for obtaining an apple, or any other food, in making that choice.

If you're looking for a place to live, the classifieds offer a nearly indecipherable abbreviated language that indicates where an apartment is, how big it is, how many bedrooms and bathrooms, upstairs or down. And, of course, the rent, which balanced against those other specifications helps you make a decision.

If anything, buying a shirt offers an even greater variety of options. Size, color, style, fabric, quality, brand. And price. How will we ever choose?

You would be hard pressed to argue that health care is more important than food, shelter and clothing. Yet we have no general expectation that government should provide any of the three; in fact we're plenty happy without government interference in those decisions, with the exception of making sure everybody's playing by the (thankfully limited) rules.

Government involvement invariably leads to two things: a one-size-fits all program (think Social Security) or one that's needlessly complex (think everything else), with both costing more than and performing worse than the private equivalent. And both are going broke at an increasingly rapid rate, which should undermine the patina of security the government allegedly provides.

“Perhaps their criticism is that we dare to do math.”

The invaluable Jake Tapper, ABC's White House correspondent, elicited the above quote from the inspector general for TARP, who the Treasury Department is trying to discredit after he estimated the government has pledged up to ... wait for it ... $24 trillion in bailout money.

That's about 22 months worth of all the production of the entire American economy.

H/T HotAir, which had this to say:

I seem to recall when Barack Obama promised the most open and transparent administration ever. Since his inauguration, Obama has fired one IG for daring to oppose a sweetheart settlement with a political ally, allowed another to get dumped by the agency she oversaw, and now have publicly feuded with Barofsky. Earlier, they tried to limit his authority by claiming that Barofsky didn’t work independently of Treasury, which got a stern letter from Senator Charles Grassley. It looks as though the White House has declared war on transparency, and especially the IGs who exist to provide it.

Welcome to Obama's America. Remember when these folks called themselves the reality-based community?

I simply do not know what to say. Or something.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

The best news of today ...

is that Mr. Tony is coming back to radio.

For those who don't know, Tony Kornheiser, formerly of the Washington Post and Monday Night Football, still of Pardon the Interruption on ESPN, hosts the best radio show ever. Since he's been hosting MNF, it's only been on from January through June, to allow for his travel. Now that he's done with that, he can return to the format where he's done arguably his best work (although this book of his WashPost sports and Style columns makes a compelling case otherwise).

Here are some highlights from the old show, which is basically a crabby, old, rich, famous, Jewish guy complaining about everything while listening to old music and asking for free stuff. And it's hilarious.

I'm so excited, y'all.

Settling in

I'm going to give Blogger a try. You can see a handful of posts on my old blog here.

Hello, world

You know the drill.