What every dad wants for Father’s Day. (a Serr8d joint)

I can’t think of a better subject for this Father’s Day than Warren Zevon, since he was the perfect example of how not to be a father.  I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead  is his story, as written by once and future wife Crystal Zevon.  It’s an entertaining read about a complex and troubled man, and as you might imagine, it elicites an equally complex reaction, at least in this reader.  As

What could be more objective than a chart that plots major websites on a horizontal axis of scurrility-earnestness, and a vertical one of opinion-news? One conservative site, Instapundit, squeaks into the intersection of the news/earnest quadrant. (h/t Hot Air headlines)

It starts in his home state of Illinois, as Alec MacGillis reports for the Washington Post: Obama’s advisers have pointed to his success in winning over “downstate” Illinoisans as a sign of his electability, but political analysts question the claim. Obama lost most of downstate Illinois in his Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate in 2004, and his big win in the general election that year came against Alan Keyes,

E.J. Dionne thinks that the recent shift in party identification favoring the Democrats “could prove the defining fact in November.”  Yuval Levin agrees that the trend is trouble for the GOP.  However, he notes that while Democrats now outnumber Republicans 37 to 28 percent, the GOP has only been above 28 percent in one presidential election year since 1968; that was in 2004.  Levin adds that party ID statistics themselves

Mr. Green Genes returns to the big screen — is it a smash?

Just in time for Father’s Day!

Friday’s column from Peggy Noonan frames a major theme the general election campaign: Mr. McCain is the Old America, of course; Mr. Obama the New. There is something to this, of course.  McCain is older; Obama is younger.  Obama has demonstrated the ability to attract many young people to rallies — and the ballot box — in the primaries; though this phenomenon is somewhat overrated in the media, it could make a difference

Yesterday in Philadelphia, Barack Obama lifted one of Sean Connery’s lines from The Untouchables: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said. Another Connery line from the same movie is the signature for my ongoing look at “the Chicago Way” here at pw.  But the screenplay was written by David Mamet, who recently declared that he is no longer a “brain-dead liberal.”

Last weekend, the New York Times covered the upside of Barack Obama’s  “Facebook politics” and openness to contributions from those working outside the campaign organization, suggesting that he may qualify as the first real “wiki-candidate.”  The article focused on people who created popular videos and posters for the campaign.  It did not take long for others — like Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs — to notice that MyBarackObama.com tended to