Notes on the weekend

1) Wade is a beast. Bosh is not. LeBron's even odds on finals MVP looks pretty bleak right now, and I'd have taken Wade myself for the better odds simply because the matchups are more in Wade's favor than LeBron's. Dirk needs someone other than Marion and Kidd to show up (and Tyson, who can't score anyway). They should probably give up on Stevenson. He cannot seem to stop Wade anyway. They need more minutes for Terry and Barea. Still, not a good sign when Miami's bench, one of the worst in the league, outplays yours either.

2) New X-Men movie was actually very good. At least as good as the second one. Much superior to the goofy third one and insanely silly fourth. I wouldn't put it in the same class as the two new Batman films on the pantheon of comic superhero movies, but it's at least in the next lower class as a solid film along with probably the second X-Men movie and Iron Man, maybe the original Superman. Plus Watchmen and Vendetta depending on how one includes "graphic novels" along this genre line.

3) I don't care very much about Weinergate. I got the twitchy impression he was covering something up, no pun intended, and it turns out he was by his admission. But I also don't get the impression that he stakes his political life based upon living an upstanding "moral" life and commanding and exhorting others to do the same. The reason there's a different standard when a prominent GOP politician gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar (Gingrich, Sanford, etc) is that they've excoriated others for doing exactly what they are doing and broadly run on the issues of "family values", whatever that means, with the implied message of things like "honor family and spouse by not cheating on them or leaving them, etc". This doesn't mean that liberal politicians who cheat are not potentially very slimy characters (there are moral arguments and justifications that they may not be in all cases). It just means that they're being less hypocritical about it by not making it a political issue and demanding moral righteousness of others while not upholding it themselves on that very issue that they demand it of. We have, unfortunately, little evidence that this lack of moral upstanding character in one's personal life and relationships makes for bad political decision making (or that moral upstanding character itself leads to good political figures). So it seems rather futile to protest for this over and above protesting for people who seem to hold other potentially useful political virtues (ability to compromise, sensible rhetorical skills, openness to reason and contrarian opinion, temperate disposition, etc), or even who hold ideological convictions of note to ourselves as individual voters. Indeed, it seems even more fruitless to devote significant airspace in our media to matters such as these (as with the birth certificate "debate" a couple of months ago that Trump stirred back up) as opposed to real policy matters.

Still, seems a little on the stupid side to send lurid pictures of yourself, a public figure, to others via the internet. Seems dumber still to try to clumsily stonewall on it and deny it.