Presidential library to open in Wasilla in 2017

Republican presidential candidate John McCain scored a landslide victory over his Democratic opponent today — in the race for the weekend news cycle.
This morning, the Associated Press wire service the Kodiak Daily Mirror depends on for most of its national and international news gagged on the news that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will run for vice president on McCain’s ticket. When I tried to put together today’s Politics page, the AP Web site couldn’t show me any stories because the Palin announcement generated so much traffic.
I have never seen anything like it since the current Web-based AP wire system went operational. Even when I typed in “Obama” or “Democratic convention” as the search terms, all I got was Palin-McCain.
Astounding.
Then again, maybe it was just a slow day for the computer. That happens.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell when somebody is being serious.
About 20 years ago, I was a graduate student in Santa Cruz, Calif. While waiting to talk to my semantics professor, I shot the breeze with his office neighbor, Tom Lehrer.
Lehrer came to fame in the 1960s for his satirical songs, like “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” “The Vatican Rag” and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park." He taught math at Harvard and later at Santa Cruz.
I asked him why he disappointed so many listeners by quitting his musical career. His answer: With the election of Richard M. Nixon as president in 1968, he couldn’t think of any jokes that would be as funny as reality.
He’s a funny guy. I thought he was joking.
I felt similarly confused when I heard Ted Stevens say that Lisa Murkowski is a better senator than her father ever was, until I remembered Ted never jokes.
Like so many Alaskans, I heard the news about Palin first thing in the morning, and wondered what crazy world I had woken up to. I also finally realized Lehrer wasn’t joking.
McCain pulled a stunt today, the kind I thought American politics had gotten past.
To me it looks like McCain, a politician I have long admired, chose Palin just to have a woman on the ticket.
He could have done that and chosen a prominent female Republican more clearly qualified to be president. Why didn’t he pick Elizabeth Dole, Christie Todd Whitman, Lisa Murkowski or even Condy Rice?
It reminds me of the Clarence Thomas appointment. In 1991, George H.W. Bush apppointed Thomas to the Supreme Court to replace Thurgood Marshall — after 24 years still the only African-American U.S. justice.
Bush could have tapped any outstanding, experienced, conservative jurist, a group that includes a great many African-Americans, if that was a consideration.
Instead he chose Thomas, whose lackluster performace on the bench surprised nobody who looked at his earlier record.
It looks like Bush got blinded by the perception that he needed to fill “the black seat” on the court, an echo from discussion about the 1939 appointment of Felix Frankfurter to replace Louis Brandeis in the court’s “Jewish seat.”
Palin ran a little town in Alaska. Then she ran all of Alaska — which is like running a little town anywhere else. There are aldermen in Chicago with more constituents. That’s not a presidential resume.
McCain cashed in a token to steal coverage today. I doubt it will prove politically worth it in the long run.
More importanly, it ruins the humor column business for me. I have used this space to exaggerate, mock, lie and go off on tangents to tangents to tangents.
I had some good material ready for today, making fun of Obama and McCain about equally, with references to Czechoslovakia and bowling, and maybe the odd crack about Bill and Hillary.
But I can’t top this one.
I now understand what Lehrer meant, and so I’m getting out. Maybe I’ll keep up my ramblings on a blog or in some other medium, but this incarnation of Out of the Loop ends here.
The AP wire wasn’t the only thing that gagged.
Thanks for watching.
Drew Herman is a copy editor at the Kodiak Daily Mirror.

Beware Olympic hype — take a polo pony to lunch

Sure, we managed to wipe their entire country out of existence 29 years later, but a lot of us are still smarting from the 1972 Olympic basketball final between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., and we could use a little more validation than our current hoopsters are likely to deliver.
So every four years, I remember the unsung heroes of past Olympics and overhaul my metaphorical accordion specially to sing them anew.
We could use a man like Thomas Hitchcock Jr. again. The handsome Harvard student flew for France in World War I, but came home to lead the U.S. polo team to silver in the 1924 Olympics.
Hitchcock and his crew had the real stuff, and given a few more decades, the U.S. would have cantered into international dominance. Every kid in America would have kept a pony in their room and practiced dropping their Rs during the off-season.
But after 1936, in a blatant bid to dim the glory of the U.S. athletic juggernaut, the International Olympic Committee dropped polo from the roster forever.
I blame fascists like former IOC head Juan Antonio Samaranch. And that’s not a slur about his management style — the man was a card-carrying member of Generalisimo Francisco Franco’s party.
Thus began the era of psuedo sports. Race walking? Rhythmic gymnastics? Synchronized swimming, for all love? If this stuff is sports, then I deserve at least a bronze for dodging traffic when I walk across the parking lot at Wal-Mart. Why not log rolling or darts? Heck, I’ve seen some balloon animal artists who work up a good sweat.
If this weren’t a humor column, I would mention cup stacking, but unfortunately that’s actually considered a sport in many U.S. school districts.
I had a linguistics professor who played cut-throat racketball — even in a singles game. He liked to say it doesn’t count as a sport unless you can hurt the other guy.
You only have to look at the butcher’s bill from the 1920 Olympic tug-of-war competition to see what real athletes risk. OK, no deaths or broken bones, but rope burns are no laughing matter. Maybe that’s why the IOC pulled the rug from under the tug, too.
In 1904, the United States swept all three medals in the Olympic tug-of-war. We lost a little ground after that, but I think we’re ready to resurge, and we lead the world in skin lotion production.
The world tug-of-war championships begin in less than four weeks, and flights to Stockholm are filling up fast.
Scriptor speculi Drew Herman sum. Ludes virumque cano.