I’m not certain whether to maintain this blog or not. Recently, I’ve been settling in here in Ann Arbor, embarking on my graduate studies and working on some other Internet projects. If you have any suggestions for how I can best make use of this website, please pass them along.

I was pretty enthused about Jim Webb as a potential Obama running mate, but this article in today’s Slate gives me pause:

When Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci removed 16 aging frigates from an administration budget request, Webb went ballistic and resigned, grousing to reporters on his way out that Carlucci failed to provide “leadership” or “strategic vision.” Even Reagan was taken aback, writing in his diary, “I don’t think Navy was sorry to see him go.”

Maybe I was too quick to favor a pair of candidates based on their literary merit. Of course, the title of the article is mere shock-jockery: “Anyone but Webb.” Really? Like who?

[Relevant follow-ups: Obama’s Long Short List, Part II; Webb’s the Man?]

I’m delighted that Barack Obama is now the Democratic candidate for the presidency. I’ve been a Barack supporter since Day One, although I wouldn’t classify myself as an “Obamaniac,” nor would I say that I am totally in the tank for him. A few weeks ago, I told friends that I, as a social liberal and economic conservative, was indifferent between Obama and McCain. But last week, I had the pleasure of reading Obama’s first memoir, Dreams From My Father.¹ The book, written before he went into politics and covering his life up until he went to Harvard Law, has made me much more fond of this man than the more distant McCain. A passage from the middle section of the book, when he’s working as a community organizer in Chicago:

Was I afraid? I didn’t think so… Wandering through Altgeld or other tough neighborhoods, my fears were always internal: the old fears of not belonging. The idea of physical assault just never occurred to me. Same thing with the distinction Johnnie [a fellow organizer] made between good kids and bad kids—the distinction didn’t compute in my head. It seemed based on a premise that defied my experience, an assumption that children could somehow set the terms of their own development. I thought about Bernadette’s five-year-old son, scampering about the broken roads of Altgeld, between a sewage plant and a dump. Where did he sit along the spectrum of goodness? If he ended up in a gang or in jail, would that prove his essence somehow, a wayward gene… or just the consequences of a malnourished world?

I’m impressed at Obama’s nuanced reflections. His way of thinking is befitting to an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and it’s befitting to a President—very Jed Bartlett-esque.

McCain could still win me over with promises of smaller government and free trade, because goodness knows the congressional Democrats have set our nation back by years on those critical issues. But this seems increasingly unlikely. McCain has stated that he knows little about economics. His budget-cutting proposals defy arithmetic. And let’s not forget the gas tax “holiday.”

McCain—listen to your economists! If you can’t win fiscal conservatives, you can’t win at all.

1. As luck would have it, the book was required for Introduction to African-American Studies.

This is the bawdiest article I’ll link to for a while, I promise:

The near-disappearance of lifetime oral virginity makes sodomy laws fairly ridiculous. The percentage of Americans aged 25 to 44 who deny ever having had oral sex now barely exceeds the percentage who admit to same-sex activity. By empirical standards, if gay sex is deviant, so is chastity of the mouth.

I’m proud to be a Budget Hero! (Link courtesy of Freakonomics.)