Splinter removal, part 2

Ok, so I suppose I should get this out of the way so I can get on with something more useful today.

As I suggested in my post last night taking issue with Nick Cohen's flippant dismissal of evolutionary psychology, my compelling need to respond was partly driven by the fact that I generally admire his writing and, on probably most things, agree with him. He's a thoughtful, original commentator, so I just couldn't let it slide by when that essay seemed like it was written on intellectual autopilot.

In a way that is not the same but somehow similar, the other thing that I haven't quite been able to get out of my head this week is Molly Ivors's accusation that some liberal criticism of Sarah Palin should be seen as misogyny.

I'm a regular reader of Whiskey Fire--where Ivors posts--not least since I feel a strong affinity for left-liberals who know how to use profanity creatively. And we probably agree on most things, such as the notion that liberals (progressives, the left, whatever noun you prefer) should not condescend to people living in rural and small town areas.

But Ivors's posts over the last week on the Palin critiques have bothered me, since I'm not sure that the problem she identifies actually exists--at least, based on the evidence she presents, in the places she says it does--and I wonder whether her suggestions, if acted upon, would be detrimental to the goal (which we seem to share) of keeping the right wing out of power.

Furthermore, both of us here at Obscene Desserts have spent a fair amount of time criticising and mocking Palin, something about which we feel completely justified.

Ivors's first post laid out the basic charge.

Exhibit A of left-liberal misogyny: Keith Olbermann in this episode of Countdown.

Here it is:




Ivors says:

[B]arely 30 seconds in, Keith Olbermann calls Palin, more or less, the Wife of Bath. Olbermann's a smart guy, and I have no issues with his fact-checking of the dates of Harry Potter publication (I did that myself) or the length of her acquaintanceship with McCain. But as a smart guy, he really should be aware of the medieval trope of the woman who will not shut up. Even as you give her more coverage than the VP who, you know, won.

So, the evidence of 'misogyny' is that Olbermann a) says Palin talks a lot, b) gives attention to the clothing issue and c) spends more time talking about her than about Joe Biden.

It occurs to me that we're setting the bar for woman-hating a bit, well...low here. There are good reasons why Olbermann might give her more attention than Biden (that she's given numerous interviews, may be gearing up for a presidential run and, you know, represents extreme political viewpoints that Olbermann finds appalling are three which come to mind), might focus on the Nieman Marcus scandal (it was directly relevant to--and contradictory of--Palin's efforts to present herself as an average woman) and might draw attention to her talkativeness (since, after being shielded from the media, she was suddenly everywhere wanting to talk about everything, and, can we not agree, she does have this knack for tortured, long-winded verbiage that means nothing.)

What I don't see here is what Ivors does:

Here's a hint: you guys think she's hot, plus she gives you a chance to smirk and sneer at women generally for their silly, profligate, Chatty-Cathy ways.

Well, I can't speak for Olbermann, but The Wife and I have spent a lot of time smirking and sneering at Sarah Palin in much the same way he has, and I can assure you that it's not because either of us finds her 'hot'.

I'm wondering if I'm...you know, missing something, since I think you have to invest a fair amount of mental effort to re-interpret Olbermann's comments as criticism of 'women generally' or to believe that he's reviving ancient tropes all in an effort to Silence Women.

Liberal misogyny, exhibit B: an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.

In particular, Ivors offers this excerpt, apparently chock full of red-hot patriarchy:



Ivors condemns the 'delighted giggles of Maher and Paul Begala' that were 'rightly called out by guests Joe Queenan and Farai Chideya, who noted both the gender and class sneering toward Palin, as well as her scapegoating.'

Let her own people call her a hillbilly: we don't need to. If we're really smarter--and I believe we are--there's no need to go down this road

Starting at about 1:30 here, Queenan points out that, as a local political figure, there's lots of things that can't be laid at her feet. Note his face and that of Chideya, both of whom are not buying into the frat boy chuckles over her ignorance.

I've watched this excerpt a couple of times now, and I'm mystified both by Ivors's condemnation of Maher and Begala as well as by her admiration of Queenan.

Maher and Begala, yes, laugh at Palin, but they see her as symbolic of a broader trend in the Republican party. Palin is, after all, a prime example of the anti-intellectual populism and God-bothering provincialism that an important section of the party (the one that was most 'energised' by Palin) has embraced. When Maher uses the word 'bimbo', he has included not just Palin, but also George W. Bush, Dan Quayle and even Ronald Reagan in that category.

And, while I haven't seen the whole show, Queenan's comments here are the epitome of non-sequitur: OK, Sarah Palin is not responsible for the Iraq War or the financial meltdown or any number of other Really Bad Things.

But...what does that have to do with anything?! As far as I know, not even her most misogynist critics have blamed her for those things.

And if we take Ivors's invitation and read Joe's face for meaning, he also seems singularly unmoved by Begala's comments about the Republican Party's embrace of full-on religious lunacy (i.e., creationism). Should we see that as another fine example of Joe the Journalist standing up to elitist smarty pants like Begala and Maher?

'Just because you're smarter than someone doesn't mean you're better than them', he concludes. Well, chalk me up as a snob, Joe, but I do think that closely considering someone's intelligence (their curiosity about the world, their ability to digest and consider complex concepts, their openness to new ideas, their ability to comment on the kinds of the issues that would be relevant to the job they're seeking) is a good idea when you're going to give them political power.

I'm not actually a huge fan of Maher, though I think he has his moments, but in that exhange he made several good points and Queenan (whom I don't know anything else about) was making very little sense at all.

Thus, I can't see how Begala, Maher or Olbermann deserve the stern warning with which Ivors concludes:

OK, let's have a look:Try to win with some grace, boys. You've beaten back the scary vaginas, whether they were qualified or not, and your penises are safe. For now.

Maybe I'm just a bit deaf when it comes to women-hatin', castration-fearin' commentary, but I think that in this case--based on the examples Ivors provides--I don't think there's any to be heard.

In two subsequent posts, Ivors has sought to clarify her position, partly in response to comments that have both agreed and disagreed, but even the latest one doesn't really bring us much further:

I'm talking about people--primarily Olbermann and Maher, but there are others--who are seizing this moment to sneer at Sarah Palin not because she's a backward-looking ignoramus with Darwinian policies and a vicious, tribal religion, but because she's a pushy woman who won't shut up and her family is declasse.

Let us just ignore the 'Darwinian policies' reference, hoping that it was meant as an ironic comment on Palin's creationist viewpoints rather than another smear linking 'Darwinisim' with reactionary economic policies. (Sigh.)

There might be people who are doing what Ivors says, but she has yet to present any convincing evidence, and if there are left-leaning people who really do equate the kind of innocuous commentary she's quoted by Olbermann and Maher with 'misogyny' (and many of the commenters on her posts agree with her), then I fear they're going to waste their time getting upset over nothing.

And I think Ivors's other concern--that our mockery of Palin will be counterproductive, and this also seemed to be Queenan's point--is unfounded. She says:

[T]he next candidate they bring forward will have more polish, and that can't be the grounds on which the Palins and their ilk are rejected. To do so not only alienates huge sections of the population, but also invites another retrograde asshole onto the national stage.

Well, I think that obviously the criticism of a candidate is going to be at least partly specific to them: i.e., when some more polished Republican candidate comes along then new lines of attack will emerge. I don't see how going after Palin in one way precludes going after another candidate in another way.

On another point we may simply disagree, but to the extent that 'huge sections of the population' adore Sarah Palin, I think they have moved themselves beyond the ability to be attracted to a Democratic Party that I would want to have that name. Mocking Palin has, I think, proven an effective weapon this year, helping to turn her (justifiably) into a millstone around the McCain campaign's neck. She, in the end, alienated large sections of America. That sounds like success for liberalism to me.

And if 'another retrograte asshole' emerges from the GOP (and that's likely, as they have plenty such orifices to spare) they're going to do so whether Olbermann or Maher or you or I laugh at Lady Also. A lot of people in the GOP love Sarah not as a response to Democratic urban elite condescension but rather because they want what she stands for. And what she stands for is not only absurd but also a threat and deserves mockery.

But does laughing at a particular woman mean you are inevitably also laughing at women in general?

Not at all, and I don't think that the particular amount of attention given to Palin is necessarily an expression of hostility to women as such. (Though I'm sure you could find examples of the latter if you look for them.) Ivor's argument that the attention given to her is somehow untoward has unfortunate echoes of Republican complaints that Palin's gaffes and mistakes were given undue attention compared to those of the other candidates.

However, when you consider the scale of Palin's incapacity and the frequency with which she demonstrated her ignorance I think that that attention is perfectly understandable.

Perhaps more to the point: is it wrong to laugh at Sarah Palin not only as an annoying, ignorant person, but also as an annoying, ignorant woman? This is more difficult, perhaps, but I don't think it is either easy or necessary to separate our perceptions of people from their sex.

To an important degree, my views of all of the people in my life (whether positive or negative) are to at least some degree inflected by their being a man or a woman. And I think this is unavoidable. George W. Bush is an annoyance partly because he represents a particular kind of man: the smirking frat-boy moron. (Ivors herself makes use of the 'frat-boy' image when critiquing Begala and Maher.) This may not be fair to all frat-boys (some of my best friends, etc., etc.....) but it's a recognisable type, and it's a type that is instantly recognisable as different than that represented by Barack Obama, John Kerry or Al Gore. Nor am I especially concerned about losing the frat-boy vote by pointing this out.

It's no different with Sarah Palin. Criticism of her--certainly criticism of the kind to which Ivors links--does not reflect upon other, demonstrably more capable female politicians.

And I don't even find the accusation of classism all that convincing, but this post has gotten long enough. Suffice to say, I think a lot of people who found her ridiculous did (and do) so not because they see her as an authentic representative of small town America but rather as a weird caricature of that kind of life.

So, in short, I think feminism has a lot more to worry about than inventing misogyny where it doesn't exist, that the left should not refrain from mockery or satire of the more absurd currents of right-wing thought (whether represented by small-town women or big-city men or vice-versa) and that those people (in whatever part of the country) who feel represented by Sarah Palin will probably never be reached by a Democratic Party that wants to maintain its sanity.

So they might at least provide us with a few laughs.

Nanobamamania

Far more interesting than the story about the mystic Obama face appearing on a slice of toast, is one about the tiny Obama portraits, each about half a millimetre wide and consisting of 150 million carbon nanotubes. (Via Boing Boing)


(Image from here. More information and pictures via www.nanobama.com)

In other news: an unholy lottery drawing in Illinois on the day after the election (yes, featuring the number 666) has got any number of sensitive Christian hearts all aflutter.

However, Bible Prophecy Today (via HJOP) has some comforting news for us:

At this point, I think it’s unlikely that Obama will be the antichrist. The beast of Revelation will come out Europe, and he will be a man of profound political skills.

Ah, that'd be Silvio Berlusconi, then.

I had suspected as much.

Radical Feminism from the Daily Mail (or: Me and Ms Jones)

Yes, you may trust your eyesight - there is radical feminism at the Daily Grail! In fact, after today I believe that this paper might be the last bulwark of radical feminism in the Western hemisphere, thanks to its ghastly opinionista, fashion editor Liz "Morticia" Jones.

For in today's issue our Lizzie depicts the spectre of "Michelle Obama-Super Mom" throwing women -- yes girls, all of us -- back into a more barbarian past (gender-wise):

It seems women are still right back slap where we were in the Fifties: smiling idiotically at the sides of our powerful men, mere Stepford housewives in the margins of history, our silly heads full of nonsense like sleepovers, worries about stale bread, the laundry and perfect hospital corners. Guess who will be clearing up after that brand new puppy?
It certainly won’t be the 44th President of the United States.

Very funny, Ms Jones. You've done a fair bit of post-election reading, I can tell.

So concerned is our Lizzie (a deep social commentator if ever there was one, known for her relentless exposure of "silly nonsense" in weighty posts about the aesthetics of loafers, Samantha Cameron's fashion sense, and having her terrible split ends removed) about Mrs Obama's self-denigration that she gets a bit carried away with her comparisons. For instance, with regard to the future first lady's tongue-in-cheek comments on her husband's domestic ineptitude, she comes up with the following moment of utter insanity:

But, let’s face it, even Osama Bin Laden must, at some point, shout down the stairs (do caves have stairs?) that he can’t find his turban to some poor, put-upon female.
Being inept at domesticity doesn’t make a leader appear more human; it merely means he is, de facto, oppressing someone else.

Point taken, Ms Jones, you don't really like the idea that a black man has become US President, do you? Thanks for being so outspoken! Has anybody ever told you that you sound a little like Sarah Palin? Maybe you should have a little sleepover in good old Wasilla one of these days. I have the feeling that you and our Lady Also would get on like a house on fire - swapping cashmere leggings, blow-drying each other's hair and then having a bit of a white supremacist karaoke with Todd and Trig.

In the meantime, please stop instrumentalising Mrs Obama as a straw woman for your racism. Do you really think that women's silly heads are so full of nonsense that they don't see through your lame ploys?

Mapping change

There are many ways of analysing voting patterns this year, but I think the most striking example is a series of maps from the New York Times (under the heading 'voting shifts').

Rather than displaying who won each state, it shows the percentage change from previous elections on a county-by-county basis: the deeper the blue or red, the greater the swing toward, respectively, the Democrats or Republicans. You can compare 2008 to 2004, 2000, 1996 and 1992.

While comparing 2008 to the 1990s elections shows that large sections of the United States are today still voting somewhat more rightward than than was once the case....


...comparing 2008 to 2000 and 2004 reveals that most of the country has shifted toward the Democrats (even in places--like the plains--where that shift has not been strong enough to translate into electoral college success).


The notable exception to this swing towards the Democrats is clearly confined to the South.

Which has an obvious explanation.

The high density of plumbers in that region.

(Other maps here, via Dale.)

Yes, we could

Although I was confident that I would wake up this morning (somewhat earlier than usual...) to an Obama victory, I still find it somehow difficult to believe it has actually happened.

Figuring out the details and absorbing all the other results will take some time. (For example, California's Prop 8 is, at the moment, too close to call, but it's not looking good. The Senate race in Minnesota is about as close as it can get.) And I'm interested in seeing some solid data on how different groups voted.

Encouragingly, it appears that Obama did well amongst white voters, at least on a par with previous Democratic candidates and possibly even better.

But, I'll feel like analysing this another time.

For now, I want to enjoy a Democratic victory, not least because it was accompanied by huge voter turnout and relatively few voting disasters (though the system still needs work).

And it seems like I'm not alone, from Chicago to Kabul.

[UPDATE] A couple of well-put things picked up while grazing the news.

Ezra Klein:

My basic emotion is relief. The skill of an Obama administration has yet to be proven. The structure of our government will prove a more able opponent of change than John McCain. But for the first time in years, I have the basic sense that it's going to be okay. Not great, necessarily. And certainly not perfect. But okay. The country will be led by decent, competent people who fret over the right things and employ the tools of the state for recognizable ends. They may not fully succeed. But then, maybe they will. At the least, they will try. And if they fail in their most ambitious goals, maybe they will simply make things somewhat better. After the constant anxiety and uncertainty of the last eight years, maybe that's enough.

Mightygodking:

Barack Obama’s race has been discussed practically to death in this last year - what it means that a black man can be elected President, what it means that white people will vote for him, what it means that white people won’t vote for him, and did his wife call someone “whitey”? (Answer: no.) But ultimately that hasn’t driven his campaign, historic as his candidacy might be (and it is). What has fundamentally driven his campaign is this: people decided, by and large, that this was a decent man.

This is not small potatoes. About the best we can ever hope for in politics, anywhere in the world, ninety-nine percent of the time, is to get somebody in charge about whom one can say “well, he might be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,” and make do with that. We have, as a whole, largely divorced ourselves from the idea that political leaders can be upstanding, moral citizens; we expect them to be bastards because the process demands that they be bastards to win.

With any luck...

Our friend Andrew has posted some incisive thoughts on why an Obama victory today is something worth caring about:

He's sometimes dismissed as a dreamer or a 'Messiah,' and his followers as glassy-eyed ideologues. But this is a caricature. During the Democratic primaries, he defeated a cunning and aggressive political machine without resorting to rumor-mongering or schoolyard insults, and looks set to repeat that achievement today. His campaign inspired unfeigned, sincere enthusiasm -- and then bound it to a regime of discipline enforced by loose but effective hierarchies. There were no damaging leaks, no dramatic resignations, no off-the-record tell-all interviews. And throughout both campaigns, Obama's message genuinely appealed to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." Some bitterly mock Obama's eloquence. I pity these curdled, angry souls. They were abandoned by their better angels long ago.

One of the things that has so surprised me about the Obama campaign -- and one of the things that convinced me to support it wholeheartedly -- was that it was nice to see liberals get their act together in such a relentlessly competent way.

They were truly ahead of the curve much of the time -- and when they weren't they caught up quickly -- and this was something almost beautiful to behold.

Surely, behind the scenes there must have been a lot more chaos than they let on.

But that's a story to be told later.

Effective organisation, coherent thinking and consistent decency may not seem all that exciting, but given the last eight years (and what the other team were offering for the next four) they sound pretty good to me.

Fond greetings to our friends stateside who will -- with any luck...well, with more than luck -- be celebrating tonight.

You know who you are.

Cards on the table

OK, just for the hell of it...

My vision of what the map will look like Tuesday night/Wednesday morning:



Obama gets 53%, McCain 46%, and 'etc.' 1% of the popular vote.

The Democrats end up with 58 senators.

Proposition 8 is narrowly defeated.

And a spirit of peace, love and reconciliation pervades the land.

This is an optimistic forecast, I know, but...well, why not?

The only thing that might seem perverse about my electoral map is putting Georgia in Obama's column, but I was intrigued by Nate Silver's comment earlier today:

If there's one state where Obama is likely to overperform his polls, it's in Georgia, where 35 percent of early voters are African-American, and where almost 30 percent of them did not vote in 2004. These are the sorts of voters that may erroneously be screened out by "likely voter" models that rely on past voting history. Obama could not only carry the state, but he might help boost Jim Martin to victory in the U.S. Senate race there—giving the Democrats a plausible path to a 60-seat caucus.

I have no idea whether that's true or not, but I'm going with it.

That's just the kind of maverick I am.

You betcha.

If this proves wildly inaccurate, then you are all free, of course, to continue ignoring my opinions.

Sleep well, Democrats: you may have a long wait in line tomorrow.

(Map made at RealClearPolitics.)

Farcically and horribly uniting the senescent and the puerile. If only for one more day.

After weeks of looking for a way to efficiently sum up my feelings about the McCain-Palin campaign, how nice to find -- in an article at Slate on election eve no less -- that Christopher Hitchens has done it for me:

Who cares that it made the United States of America look thuggish and ignorant and petty in the eyes of any thinking person in the Middle East? Anyone who does care should be getting ready to vote against this humiliating ticket, a team that so farcically and horribly unites the senescent and the puerile.

The specific cause of Hitch's dismay? The McPalin attacks on Middle East scholar, Rashid Khalidi.

Yes, the ones we recently saw being so thuggishly defended by Michael Goldfarb.

Less thuggishly, but no less pettily, McCain spokesperson Ben Porritt recently had a tough time untangling himself from Palin's suggestion, on a conservative talk radio show, that her First Amendment rights were being infringed by press criticism:



The McPalin campaign is becoming so reliably entertaining that I'm almost disappointed that the campaign is over tomorrow.

Almost.

Painfully stupid. Yet somehow fascinating.

As part of that enjoyment I mentioned...

The Wife just forwarded this amazing video on to me of former Saturday Night Live comedienne Victoria Jackson explaining how Barack Obama is a Communist and how liberals actually control the country:

'I've done a lot of research. And I read the book 1984 by George Orwell twice.'

Astonishing.


But not quite as astonishing, somehow, as the comments by 'Joe the Plumber' on Fox News, defending the agreement he expressed with comments made by an audience member at a campaign event:

A McCain supporter asked if "a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel." JTP hardly batted an eye.

"I'll go ahead and agree with you on that," Wurzelbacher said.

On Fox News, Shepard Smith questions him on that. And, surprise, surprise, Joe talks nonsense. But it's nonsense of such sublime perfection that it's worth hearing in full.



Now, JT Plumber's views on these things might be meaningless and inconsequential.

However: it was the McCain-Palin campaign that made Joe one of their key figureheads.

It was also the campaign that -- as noted in the video -- issued a statement praising Joe's 'penetrating and clear analysis' after his thoughtful contribution to Middle East politics.

Last but far from least, during a radio interview on Friday, Sarah Palin added to the fun by making some entirely bizarre comments about the criticism she has received during the campaign.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, this is 'so dumb it hurts':

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

Greenwald responds:

The First Amendment is actually not that complicated. It can be read from start to finish in about 10 seconds. It bars the Government from abridging free speech rights. It doesn't have anything to do with whether you're free to say things without being criticized, or whether you can comment on blogs without being edited, or whether people can bar you from their private planes because they don't like what you've said.

If anything, Palin has this exactly backwards, since one thing that the First Amendment does actually guarantee is a free press. Thus, when the press criticizes a political candidate and a Governor such as Palin, that is a classic example of First Amendment rights being exercised, not abridged.

This isn't only about profound ignorance regarding our basic liberties, though it is obviously that. Palin here is also giving voice to the standard right-wing grievance instinct: that it's inherently unfair when they're criticized. And now, apparently, it's even unconstitutional.

[...]

Is it even possible to imagine more breathtaking ignorance from someone holding high office and running for even higher office?

I'd have to admit that it is indeed difficult to imagine anything more ignorant.

But stay tuned, there are still a couple of days to go.

I'm sure the Republicans will come up with something.

It's going to be OK

Something occurred to me last night, sort of out of the blue:

Barack Obama is going to win this election.

Given all the signs, this shouldn't be all that controversial. However, there have been several stories about nervous Democrats not wanting to believe it'll be true, fearing another stolen election or a last-minute shift in the polls.

I can understand this. And until last night I suppose I could count myself as one of those folks.

But with only a few days left, I want to enjoy this road to victory. This is going to be something to savour, increasingly so as the McCain-Palin campaign goes through it's final, absurd death throes and becomes more and more of an embarrassment.

There'll be plenty of suspense, to be sure, about how exactly this all turns out (and there are a few Senate races and ballot initiatives to be watched closely), but I believe it's going to be a lot less close and contested than the press narrative in this final stretch will suggest.

This is not an argument for complacency: to the contrary, I urge Democrats (and those of any affiliation leaning toward Obama) to go out and cast their votes and thereby increase the chances that the word 'landslide' is uttered sometime on Tuesday evening. Given what I've read (and heard) the Democrats have learned from previous mistakes and have the ground war well in hand.

Just remember: you don't get bragging rights unless you were part of the effort.

It's good to win. Let's win big.

And have fun doing it.

Just think: we will never have to hear from Joe the Plumber ever again.

Ah, bliss...

Eloquence in action

Among the various reasons that John McCain's campaign has been struggling this year (I mean, apart from the negative effect of Bible Spice), I think we should give credit to the excellent spokespeople he's got working for him.

We've already highlighted the unconvincing gibberish of the improbably named Tucker Bounds, and today we can add to it the playground antics of Michael Goldfarb, who appeared on CNN to discuss the GOP's latest guilt-by-association wheeze, the one involving Rashid Khalidi:



No doubt, there are some delusional McCain supporters who think that Goldfarb comes off looking good in this video, just as they seemed to think that it was the reporter who got the best of Joe Biden in this bizarre exchange involving a quotation from Karl Marx.

That's fine.

I would be the last person to rob them of their delusions.

They don't, after all, have much else going for them.

And I am nothing if not generous. Especially to losers.

One small request though: after this election, can we perhaps agree that use of the word 'maverick' or the phrase 'pallin' around' will be made somehow punishable? I'm open to suggestions for what an appropriate punishment might be.

Blue State Boy

Perhaps some of you, like me, have become regular readers (i.e., hopeless addicts) of FiveThirtyEight.com, a sort of election meta-site that collects, criticises and combines polling data on this year's US election to try to get an accurate sense of what's going on.

I'd like to think, anyway, that I'm not the only one refreshing the site 10 times an hour to see if anything -- anything! -- new has appeared.

Along with presenting data, the site has a series called 'Road to 270' (that number referring to the magic majority in the electoral college) that looks at each state in some detail.

They have now done profiles of the two states in which I have lived (and voted), and I've learned a thing or two.

For instance, consider the state where I lived for nine years (as my last US residence, it will be the place where where my vote will count for the rest of my voting life).

Maryland, it turns out, is not only probably the most liberal state south of the Mason-Dixon Line -- which, given the competition, I could have guessed -- but...

This is one of the most liberal states in the nation, with every statewide office Democratic-held and both state legislatures holding Democratic super-majorities. Six of eight House seats are Democratic, with only the 1st and 6th CDs held by Republicans. After a series of four single digit elections (Carter '76, Carter '80, Reagan '84, and Bush '88), Maryland has broken Democratic by double digits each of the last four elections beginning with Bill Clinton.

...

It's also the 4th highest percentage of African-American vote, the 2d highest percentage of female vote, and the single most-educated state (good job hitting the books, Maryland). It ranks 10th most liberal on the Likert scale, and has the 2d most self-identifying Democrats. Same-sex households by percentage rank in the upper quartile, and there are many more Starbucks than Walmarts. The high education rates lead Maryland to be the 2d highest per capita income state, which doesn't directly correlate with Democratic voting.

I had no idea that Maryland was so well-educated and wealthy. (This might have to do with the places I lived in Maryland, which were not often either of these...)

The unbalanced Starbucks/Walmart ratio was a bit more obvious.

Today, a profile was added for my real home state, Illinois, concluding, somewhat dispiritingly, that it is 'among the least interesting places to be a voter in the entire country' due to becoming solidly Democratic.

But there has been one very interesting development. At least if you come from where I do.

The story of Illinois' political transformation is the story of the bluing of the Chicago suburbs, which now account for slightly more than 50 percent of the state's population. In 1988, Lake County, the wealthy area to Chicago's north that is featured in all those John Hughes movies, went for George Bush by 27.7 points, making it 20 points more Republican than the country as a whole. But every year since, that number has been pared down some. In 1992, Lake County was 13 points more Republican than the rest of the country; in 1996, 8 points more Republican; in 2000, 3 points more Republican, and then finally in 2004, John Kerry outperformed his national margins there, although still lost the country by a hair (Barack Obama won't have the same problem).

Even my home county -- anything but Democratic when I was there -- may be turning bluer. Back during the primaries, Chicago Tribune writer Eric Zorn noted:

Eight years ago in DuPage County, Republican voters outnumbered Democrats 3-1 in the presidential primary election.

Four years ago, the pro-GOP split in the traditionally Republican enclave was 55-45.

On Tuesday, Democratic voters [in the primaries] outnumbered Republican voters in DuPage County 54-46 percent (131,345 votes to 112,240 votes).

Now, if we could only get the same dynamic going in my family....

A message from www.peopleinthemiddleforobama.org

More Marxist radicals like this one here.

Via Boing-Boing.

Dictatorship of the Obamatariat?

Apparently unaware of the Marxist threat posed by an Obama presidency, the Financial Times has endorsed the Illinois senator.

US presidential elections involve a fabulous expense of time, effort and money. Doubtless it is all too much – but, by the end, nobody can complain that the candidates have been too little scrutinised. We have learnt a lot about Barack Obama and John McCain during this campaign. In our view, it is enough to be confident that Mr Obama is the right choice.

Alternatively, the paper might have been infiltrated by a radical socialist cell. How else are we to explain this?

We applaud his main domestic proposal: comprehensive health-care reform. This plan would achieve nearly universal insurance without the mandates of rival schemes: characteristically, it combines a far-sighted goal with moderation in the method.

The long list of conservatives who have publicly backed Obama should make it apparent that the "He's a Scary Radical/Muslim/Socialist Who Associates With Terrorists and Hates Real America" line is a delusion and can die the quiet death it deserves.

But that's unlikely.

It seems it is all the McCain-Palin team and their increasingly troglodytic fan base have left.

As Thers points out:

This class of stuff, you'll note, comes from people who argue that a 3% increase in the income tax rate for people making over $250K is "Marxism" and anyone who says otherwise is a Red. This is what makes the "Bill Ayers" stuff so bizarre. By Corner standards, Marxism starts at, well, Ben Bernanke. Stanley Kurtz thinks "conventional-seeming Democratic liberalism" IS "radical politics."

'The Corner', for those of you who don't lurk in that sector of the blogospheric gutter, is a group blog at the National Review.

Thers sums up:

The Corner is a porn site for the resentfully ill-educated.

And I couldn't agree more.

Indeed, it's fascinating to watch the extent to which the right-wing is taking on precisely those characteristics for which they have long condemned the left, such as whining about exclusion (see the harping on about the media's liberal bias) and retreating into identity politics (real-v.-fake-America, pro- v. anti-America, Joe the Plumber, etc., etc....).

And, yes, that's fun to watch.

Even Ann Althouse (and I am no fan of hers) recognises the absurdity of the paranoid claims about Obama's 'socialism'. Speaking of McCain's appearance on Meet the Press yesterday, she summarises:

Whenever he found the chance, he would stress that Barack Obama has a far-left ideology, and whenever he needed a different argument -- such as when Brokaw confronted him with his own statements in favor of making the rich pay more taxes -- he would resort to the argument that different times require different solutions. How can you use these two rhetorical strategies alternately? It's incoherent.

(Full transcript here, video here. Althouse has selected some of the relevant sections of the transcript in her post.)

Of course, if you're one of those people who believes that proposing that wealthy people pay a somewhat higher percentage of their income in taxes is enough to make you a 'socialist' or a 'Marxist', then perhaps you think that McCain, too, is a fellow traveller.

And, I am sure, there are such people, since I've met a few. I had a lengthy semester-long debate along these lines with a former student of mine way back in the mists of time when I taught British history in the US. It reached the point at which she, of a pronouncedly libertarian persuasion, asserted that both John Major and Winston Churchill were socialists.

I betcha didn't know that!

Yes, it was a trying semester. It was at about that point where the discussion ended, as no further communication is possible with people who live in alternate universes.

You know, maybe we should take a closer look at the sources of McCain's possibly radical views.

Such as his hero, Republican president Teddy Roosevelt.

As Timothy Noah notes, Roosevelt was often labelled a socialist, and he advocated progressive taxation as a way of addressing inequality:

Our aim is to recognize what Lincoln pointed out: The fact that there are some respects in which men are obviously not equal; but also to insist that there should be an equality of self-respect and of mutual respect, an equality of rights before the law, and at least an approximate equality in the conditions under which each man obtains the chance to show the stuff that is in him when compared to his fellows [italics Noah's].

Commie...pinko...Bastard!

It's probably fruitless to hope for a return to semi-sanity after the election, isn't it?

[Addendum]

It occurs to me that anyone who continues to make the 'Obama is a dangerous radical/Marxist/Socialist' argument in the face of widespread support for him from moderates -- and even from conservatives -- has to therefore also be saying at least one of the following:

1) Large numbers of politically moderate or conservative people who are either in politics themselves or who closely observe politics have been duped by the liberal mainstream media into ignoring The Truth.

and/or

2) These moderates and conservatives are not really moderates and conservatives, but are actually quite radical people themselves and have just been pretending to be moderates and conservatives (perhaps a variation on the 'no true Scotsman' argument).

Given that either of these is fairly improbable they are more likely simply demonstrating something else: how radical their own points of view are and how disconnected they are from the mainstream America that they so loudly (and tiresomely) proclaim to be defending.

Which seems obvious, but I don't imagine that you'll find many of them admitting it.

True

Not being in the US, I can escape the onslaught of political advertising that some people (those in closely-fought states) are experiencing.

Given that I'm not an undecided voter and have already cast my ballot, such things would be a bit redundant for me anyway.

But a couple of things I've caught online have struck me as being quite effective.

First, a 'no on Prop 8' ad from California. (This is one of the many 'ballot initiatives this year in many states, and in this case it revolves around the issue of gay marriage. In short: 'no' is in favour of equal rights, 'yes' is against.)

This series of ads is based on Apple's well known 'get a Mac' campaign. (Like Google, Apple has donated to the 'no on Prop 8' campaign.)



I also like this one, which stars Molly Ringwald, along with her real-life husband and daughter:



Finally, I present this pro-Obama ad based on the famous 'Wassup?' ad campaign for the Anheuser-Busch company that ran from 1999 to 2002.

In case you have forgotten them (or never saw them...they were inescapable for Americans), the original is available here.

The new ad is both entertaining and powerful:

Sarah Palin is an ignorant fool. I kid you not.

On any given day, the odds Sarah Palin will say something outrageously stupid approach those that the sun will rise in the east.

So I have to admit that I wasn't exactly surprised to see her make the following comments about scientific research:

"Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not."

Just parenthetically, keep in mind that this was her first major policy address of the campaign, so you think that she might have thought a bit about what she was going to say. (Which is more unsettling: that she did or that she didn't?)

And spare some space in your mind for the fact that this speech was about a topic area she has proclaimed to be one that she is knowledgeable about and has a personal investment in: the treatment of 'special needs' children.

First off, I'm not sure how to understand the jibe about Paris. Is Palin simply unaware that scientific research is often done across international boundaries? Or is this just anti-European bias (not all that uncommon on the right, after all)?

Is she suggesting that the French are inept at science?

Or -- given her lack of personal experience of the wider world -- does she just happen to hold a rather stereotyped notion of what life in France is like:



All those frilly knickers, admittedly, might just get in the way in the lab.

Might she feel better about such research if we re-named fruit flies, say, 'freedom flies'?

Anyway, I'm not a scientist, nor does my work involve Drosophila. Indeed, my only experiences with the little bastards have generally been negative. Rather like Dale's.

However, reactions from people who do know a thing or two about scientific research have not been kind.

Take it away PZ:

This idiot woman, this blind, shortsighted ignoramus, this pretentious clod, mocks basic research and the international research community. You damn well better believe that there is research going on in animal models — what does she expect, that scientists should mutagenize human mothers and chop up baby brains for this work? — and countries like France and Germany and England and Canada and China and India and others are all respected participants in these efforts.

Via Think Progress, a report last year highlighted just one of the practical results of fruit fly research:

Now scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have shown that a protein called neurexin is required for these nerve cell connections to form and function correctly.

The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies may lead to advances in understanding autism spectrum disorders, as recently, human neurexins have been identified as a genetic risk factor for autism.

jforman at Daily Kos gives some examples of the usefulness of such basic research, and he then observes:

Why do we use model organisms to study human biology? Well, it's kind of hard to tinker with live humans. Ethics and what not.

And why is it even possible to study human biology using model organisms? That answer is simple - evolution. Yeast, worms, fruit flies, slime molds, corn, humans - we all have the same common ancestor. Our basic components are the same. It's shocking to think about, but it's true. Our basic components are the same as those in single-celled yeast at the molecular level. That's why studying the yeast cell cycle means studying the human cell cycle. There are differences, of course. But they're not nearly as big as you would think.

I'm not really all that shocked that Sarah Palin didn't know this. She doesn't even believe in evolution, after all. But that she has advisers and speechwriters who don't really, really scares me.

It is, of course, only really 'scary' should McCain-Palin win. Otherwise, it's merely shameful. But, then, it's mainly a problem for the good people of Alaska.

And they elected her, so, as momma used to say, that's their fucking problem.

This is hardly a one-off: McCain also expressed his disdain for science education by dismissively referring to an 'overhead projector' that Barack Obama had sought funding for: it turns out this was a major item of long-overdue machinery that is the centrepiece of science education at the oldest planetarium in the western hemisphere. (Which I feel quite strongly about, seeing as some of my fondest childhood memories involve that place. To quote Jon Stewart: Fuck all y'all.)

Given that her popularity is melting faster than the ice on Alaska's North Slope and that even the McCain campaign itself might even have grown tired of her, might we be able to hope that she will totter off back up north on her Naughty Monkeys and let the grown-ups get on with the serious business of governing?

Given that there is a section of the right-wing 'base' that continues to adore her not despite but rather seemingly because of her ludicrous viewpoints, I suspect that things will turn out rather differently.

Tina Fey has a long career before her, methinks.

Undecided

An insightful perspective from The Daily Show on that mysterious group of people, 'undecided voters':



It's all true.

Except that bit about the Chicago Cubs.

There's always next year, man.

(Via my old highschool friend -- and fellow Cubs fan -- at The Dilettante's Dilemma.)

Woman attacked by democrat mugger at ATM

Oh puh-leeze.


[UPDATE]: Well, she bloody made it all up, didn't she? What a sad, pitiable, attention-seeking failure is this person? But then again if she is in any way representative of the mood amongst the Republicans ... yippeeeh!

On that note: for comfortingly pathetic crowds at Palin events check out this video by Marc Maron.

Election round-up: 'real America' edition

I've spent the last week or so in Britain submerged in research-related work on a crime-history project. So, while not exactly in a news-free zone (even if the headlines seemed as occupied by Madonna's impending divorce as anything else), I've been, shall we say, a bit distracted in my efforts to keep up with US election news.

And I missed commenting on so much: the third debate! Joe the Plumber!! Palin on SNL!!!

Oh well...I'm imagining you won't mind.

In trying to catch up with what's going on, I have noticed that the ugly turn in the Republican campaign -- when we last tuned in, they were labelling Barack Obama the friend of terrorists -- has not only not been reversed but has even expanded.

Seeming bereft of any ideas for, you know, actually making an argument that they know how to run the country, Republicans are instead relying -- solely, as far as I can tell -- on energetically smearing efforts to register more voters, inflaming resentful divisions between regions (even within states) and warning of the threat a 'socialist' Obama administration would pose to basic American freedoms.

This is likely, I think, to fail, and will likely drive independents and moderates away. There are years in which you can't win an election solely with angry pseudo-plumbers, religious extremists and moose hunters, and this might be one of them.

True, there are people who do find McCain-Palin appealing. Like Tracy, whose husband is still undecided about whether to vote Democratic or Republican.

She, however, has definitely made up her mind:


(via Geoff)

One of the most chilling moments I've ever seen on television has to be watching Tracy's face when she says, referring to her undecided husband, 'He knows what the right decision is.' I'm not sure what she can threaten him with, though, as simply being married to her sounds like all the punishment one person can legally be forced to endure.

(If you're interested in seeing the context from which that excerpt comes, see the PBS 'Now' website. The 'Virginia Votes' video -- in which Tracy's husband comes across as a pretty thoughtful guy -- is available here.)

In any case, a number of other conservatives -- some gesturing toward the brain-dead aggression of their party's campaign -- have endorsed Obama. (As a commentator at Daily Kos points out, it might be just because they too are black, as Rush Limbaugh has suggested was the case with Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama. He's a classy guy, Rush, yes indeed.)

If this goes much further, you sort of wonder what kind of people the Republican Party is going to be left with after November.

Tracy should, indeed, have some interesting company.

As to the various other things, I've run across a few good commentaries.

The Chicago Tribune, for example, has officially endorsed Obama:

Many Americans say they're uneasy about Obama. He's pretty new to them.

We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.

An unsuprising decision, you say, for a paper based in Obama's political hometown? Well...

This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party's nominee for president. [Emphasis added.]

When I was growing up, we were Sun-Times readers in our house (which is kind of strange now that I think about it, as my parents always voted Republican...), but this still gives me a very good feeling.

On the ACORN (non-)scandal, Dave Neiwert (in a post that is -- as always -- worth reading) points us to an AP article examining the charges that the activist group -- in McCain's measured words -- might "now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

For AP, Deborah Hastings states,

Voter fraud is rare in the United States, according to a 2007 report by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Based on reviews of voter fraud claims at the federal and state level, the center's report asserted most problems were caused by things like technological glitches, clerical errors or mistakes made by voters and by election officials.

"It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than he will impersonate another voter at the polls," the report said.

Alex Keyssar, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, calls the current controversy "chapter 22 in a drama that's been going on awhile. The pattern is that nothing much ever comes from this. There have been no known cases of people voting fraudulently."

"What we've seen," Keyssar said, "is sloppiness and someone's idea of a stupid joke, like registering as Donald Duck."

Harold Myerson, in 'The Power of Two Myths' in The Washington Post, makes a similar point:

For years, the Republican response to the rising number of non-white voters in particular has been: If you can't win their vote, suppress it. So the GOP has propagated the myth that large numbers of people are voting who shouldn't be, that voter registration groups such as ACORN, which the Republican ticket regularly attacks, are, like the big-city machines of yore, casting ballots in the name of the dead and stealing elections.

Ferreting out these nefarious activities became a central focus of the Justice Department under John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales at the direction of the Bush White House. The department instructed all U.S. attorneys that the prosecution and conviction of voter-fraud perpetrators was, in Gonzales's words, a "top priority." Extensive investigations were undertaken across the nation. Yet, by 2005, as Art Levine reported in the American Prospect this April, only two people had been charged with falsifying or fabricating voter registration forms, and nobody had been charged with impersonating another voter.

But the current attacks on ACORN provide the pretext for attempts to turn black voters and college students away from their polling places. In Ohio, the Republican war on voting has already begun. Hamilton County (that's Cincinnati) prosecutor Joseph Deters, who is also the Southwest Ohio regional chair of the McCain campaign, subpoenaed the records of 266 new voters who have cast absentee ballots because he suspected their addresses might not comport to other public records. A GOP fundraiser in the state is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to deny 200,000 recent registrants the right to vote because their addresses on their registration forms don't match those on their driver's licenses, a discrepancy that suggests that the voters have moved or that the addresses were entered incorrectly by the registrar's offices.

If you can't find the crime here, you're not alone. A number of the U.S attorneys fired by Gonzales got the ax for failing to uncover such crimes, though they conducted far-reaching investigations. David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico, told Levine that voter fraud "is like the boogeymen parents use to scare their children. It's very frightening, and it doesn't exist."

(The Levine article cited, 'The Republican War on Voting', is well worth reading.)

And on the 'real America' meme (or the effort to divide the country into those who are 'pro-America' and 'anti-America') that is emerging as a centrepiece of the GOP campaign, I can't think of a better response than Jon Stewart's comments on the expressed views of Sarah Palin, Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, and McCain campaign aide Nancy Pfotenhauer:



I don't now live in what anyone would regard as 'real America'. Because...well, it's really not in America. And even were it to be admitted to the Union, polls suggest that Germany -- although currently governed by a mainly conservative coalition -- would be among the bluest of blue states.

Nevertheless, I consider myself as 'real' an American as any other, not least since I think that that category should have as little to do with geography as it does with skin colour. (No Blut und Boden ideologies for us, thank you)

Take that as you will.

At least, however, I have no problem pronouncing 'Pfotenhauer'.

[UPDATE] Olbermann also chimes in.



(via Pharyngula)

Civic duty. Done.

Voting for president via a German post office is a somewhat strange feeling, but I suppose I should get used to it.

So, I have now done my small part in ensuring Maryland's 10 juicy electoral votes go to Barack Obama and also given Deutsche Post a rather extortionate sum for their part in this little democratic transaction (the size of the ballot envelope apparently knocked it up a few price brackets...don't local election officials in Baltimore think about these things!).

Freedom, truly, is not free.

Nevertheless, although having finally gotten a chance to cast my vote is a good feeling, something's...missing.

I actually used to love election days at home: everything from voting in the morning at the school or library that was my designated polling station in crisp autumn weather (or, sometimes rain) to watching the coverage that evening (preferably in some local watering hole with some like-minded fellow voters).

Somehow, filling in the little ovals with my no. 2 pencil and signing the oath before mailing it off was not quite the same...especially with three weeks still to wait until the result.

Three long weeks....