Half Changed World

Huckabee

I've been rooting for Mike Huckabee to gain some traction in the Republican presidential race for months, but now that he's actually climbing to the top of the polls, I'm not sure what to make of it.

I was rooting for him for several reasons:

• Unlike most of the Republican candidates, he seems to decide his positions based on something other than the latest polling results. 
• He believes that immigrants and poor people are also God's children, and isn't afraid to say so.
• It gave me the opportunity to tsk at the religious right for their hypocrisy in not supporting him.  (It's obviously a sign that I'm still not as cynical as I need to be that I was shocked that Robertson endorsed Giuliani.)
• In general, I'm a sucker for underdogs.

But now, he's not looking like an underdog anymore.  And I think that he'd be a hard candidate for any of the Dems to run against in the general election, because it would put those social wedge issues front and center in the campaign. 

What I've read

I seem to have made an annual tradition of noting which of the Times Notable Books of the Year I've read.  It's an easy post at a busy time of the year. So here goes:

• The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao.  Terrific.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Yes, I got it the first weekend it was out.  Not as good as the first one in the series (which I've just started reading out loud to D) but far better than the last couple.
• The View from Castle Rock.  I thought this was really interesting, without actually liking it all that much.  There's one story in it that appears to be the real-life episode that one of the stories in Runaway is based on -- someday, I want to read the two stories side by side.
• The Yiddish Policeman's Union.  Loved it.
• The Argument.  Thought provoking, but I'm convinced by Ezra Klein's criticism of Bai --he claims the Dems are only about politics, not policy, but that's because he interprets all policy arguments through a political lens.

I also read The Emperor's Children, Intuition, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and The Places In Between from the previous year's list.  I got the Lay of the Land out of the library, but couldn't get past the first couple of chapters.

Choose your candidate

The Washington Post website has an interactive "choose your candidate" tool that purports to show you which candidate you should be supporting, based on their public statements on a variety of issues, and how important you say these issues are.  I spent some time playing with it, and it mostly demonstrated to me how close the Democratic candidates are on most of the issues that I care about.  If you can parse the differences between what they're all saying on Social Security or immigration, you're doing better than I am.  And while the tool lets you say how much you care about the issue in general, it doesn't have any way for you to indicate how much you care about the differences in the candidates' positions.  I think I gave up on it about halfway through, when it was saying I should be supporting Chris Dodd.

Precisely because the candidates are so close together on policy, the areas where they disagree, even a little, are getting a lot of attention, perhaps excessive.  One of the areas where some differences have shown up is on health care.  Kucinich is the only one standing up for a true single payor system, while Obama has criticized Edwards and Clinton for requiring everyone to get health insurance.  He's dead wrong on this -- both because you really do need to get everyone into the insurance pool in order to avoid people freeloading until they actually get sick, and because the attack on "mandates" is likely to come back and haunt him if he actually gets elected.  (I don't have the energy to go hunting for a full set of links right now, but this has been exhaustively discussed in the wonkosphere. )

So, on one of the few areas of substantive difference, I think Obama's wrong.  But I still think he's my pick.  I'm embarrassed by that.  I'm a self-proclaimed policy wonk.  But he makes me want to believe. 

***

On a related topic, this week you'll see an ad in my sidebar from the fine folks at One.org, who have asked all the candidates about what they'd do to fight international poverty and disease. Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity is a similar exercise focused on domestic poverty.  Check them both out.

that solar model

Alison Bechdel has a new DTWOF strip up about the solstice and I may never be able to complain about a dark midwinter again without thinking of it.

Happy Hanukkah!

Hanukkah is early this year, and I'm not quite mentally ready for it.  I'm looking forward to our annual latke-fest on Saturday, but haven't done much in way of prep.  Hopefully the snow we're supposed to get tomorrow will be gone by then -- our house is on a quite steep hill, and it's already getting a little treacherous with the leaf piles everywhere.

We've got almost all the gifts for the boys, although I'm going to be late sending most of mine to my family.  For the first night, we gave D a guitar (and the promise of lessons in the new year) and N a Super Fort. These are their big presents from us; for the rest of the holiday, they'll be getting things ranging from books and gardening tools to slippers and umbrellas.  And we're following my family's custom of having one night's present be for tzedakah -- I'll have them make a selection from Heifer's catalog.  I got T the Switzerland expansion of Ticket to Ride.

Since I'm sort of frazzled, blogging is feeling more like another thing on the to-do list than something I'm really excited about.  So I'll post when I'm in the mood, and not when I'd rather veg out and do something mindless.

The Golden Compass

T and I got a babysitter last night and went out to a preview showing of The Golden Compass last night. I'm a huge fan of the books -- I've been lending out my copies for years to try to get more people to read them -- and have been looking forward to the movie with a combination of excitement and nervousness.  The books are big, complicated, and challenging, and I was afraid that they just wouldn't survive the translation to the big screen.  But the gorgeously designed website and previews gave me hope that the makers "got" the book.

So, what's my verdict?  Mixed.  The movie is gorgeous.  They got the vision right -- the subtle differences between Lyra's world and ours, the ways that the children's daemons flicker from shape to shape, the fierceness of the bears.  Nicole Kidman is close to perfect as Mrs. Coulter, and young Dakota Blue Richards gives a respectable performance as Lyra.  And they avoid the potential trap of making the daemons overly cute.

But the movie is less than two hours long, and this forces a condensation of the story that loses much of its heart.  New characters are introduced so thickly that it's hard to care much about any of them.  But more importantly, everything seems to fall into place for Lyra, without her doing much.  When she tells Pan that it's been far harder than they expected, I didn't really believe her. 

[I also have another complaint about the movie that's something of a spoiler, so I'll post it in the comments.]

Much of the attention the movie has gotten has been about the claim that the movie is an attempt to recruit kids to atheism, which Snopes classifies as essentially true.  I think that's not quite fair -- the producers are clearly mostly interested in selling tickets, and the philosophical issues in the book (which are pretty abstract in the first one) are pretty much erased from the movie.  Based on interviews that Pullman has given, it's clear that he held his tongue about the changes they made to his story, in the hope that a successful movie would attract readers to the books.

The books have been generally labeled young adult fantasy, but I'd say they're really meant for adults and fairly sophisticated teenagers.  The movie is rated PG-13 for "fantasy violence" and I'd say that it's probably best for 10-13 year olds.  The violence is actually handled quite subtly -- early on, it's established that when people die, their daemons disappear in a swirl of golden dust, so in the battle scenes you know that each dazzling swirl is a death.  What I think makes it unsuitable for young children is the absolute unreliability of many adults, including parents.