Democrats
mikethemadbiologist | February 2, 2008Seven years into the reign of Little Lord Pontchartrain, some Democrats still don't get that the Republicans and movement conservatives do not reconsider and rethink, they regroup and rearm. driftglass tries to help Democratic Kansas Governor Sebelius understand this (bold original):
And then comes the Democratic response from Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius.
Sebelius: I'm a Democrat, but that doesn't matter tonight. The fact that you're tuning in suggests that you're[....]
Oh, Jebus. Pause, while I roll my eyes and reach for the Fwow Up Bag.
Sebelius: I will now detour from the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 31, 2008...the morons at Bucky's Family Restaurant do. From some actual NY Times reporting:
"I wish there was somebody worth voting for," said Buford Moss, a retired Union Carbide worker sitting at the back table of Bucky's Family Restaurant here, with a group of regulars, in a county seat that -- as the home of the 11th president, James K. Polk -- is one of the ancestral homelands of Jacksonian Democracy.
"The Democrats have left the working people," Mr. Moss said.
"We have nobody representing us," he continued, adding that he was "sad to say" he had voted previously for Mr. Bush. He was…
mikethemadbiologist | January 30, 2008Damn. I guess I won't be voting for him on Tuesday. Well, Obama is my favorite now...
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2008I know I've been attacking John Aravosis for his disdain of helping the poor. But he is right that the twenty percent of unelected Democratic convention delegates known as superdelegates is an undemocratic idea. Unfortunately, his arithmetic is a little off:
As you know, the Democratic nomination is going to be decided by how many delegates each candidate has. And as you also know, candidates win delegates by winning state primaries and caucuses (or at least placing in those states that don't award all the delegates to the top candidate). Well, what you may not have known is that your vote…
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2008If you're like most sentient humans, you don't care whom the NY Times editorial board decided to endorse for president. But the 'logic' behind the endorsement of Clinton is revealing. The Mandarin Class still doesn't get it. About Clinton's foreign policy experience, the Times editors write:
It is unfair, especially after seven years of Mr. Bush's inept leadership, but any Democrat will face tougher questioning about his or her fitness to be commander in chief. Mrs. Clinton has more than cleared that bar, using her years in the Senate well to immerse herself in national security issues,…
mikethemadbiologist | January 26, 2008I don't want "hope", I want good policies, politics, and results. Obama demonstrates exactly how not to argue against Republican militarism. From Ezra Klein:
I'm sympathetic to what I think Obama was trying to say, but the point is better put more simply -- to have the best shot at winning national security arguments with John McCain, the Democrats need a candidate who didn't support the invasion of Iraq. After all, McCain won't be tarred with the specific acts of "incompetence" that are frequently (and misleadingly) alleged to have been responsible for disaster in Iraq. The Democratic…
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2008If you think that preventing Bush from granting retroactivity immunity for the telcos is a good thing, you might expect Democratic presidential candidates to demonstrate leadership by filibustering the bill. Or maybe not:
Bush is about to get his number one priority through Congress, a move that could be stopped by Edwards, Obama, or Clinton, especially the latter two. This is the move to implement retroactive immunity for telecom companies who spy on Americans and violate core constitutional principles.
All that is required to fight this is for Clinton or Obama to put the glare of the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 20, 2008After the New Hampshire primary, I wrote:
The most surprising thing is that, looking at the exit polls for Iowa and NH, it really seems that Clinton and Edwards were competing for the same electorate. The storyline was that Edwards and Obama were duking it out for the "change" vote. Not so much. Sadly, we might not be so post-racist after all. If you prefer a less cynical speculation, voters might actually want candidates to talk about things other than 'hope', like healthcare.
Chris Bowers at Open Left ("The World's Slowest Loading Website EVAH!") has crunched some numbers:
Obama is…
mikethemadbiologist | January 17, 2008Other than Atrios, I'm the only one who thinks Romney would be the hardest Republican for Democrats to beat. Here's why.
The Somerby Effect. One thing to keep in mind is that the traditional media narratives, while trivial for all politicians, are strongly biased against Democrats ("Obambi", obsessive hatred of the Clintons, "The Breck Girl"). Second, on a factual claim, a counter-argument always receives less attention than the original argument because political reporters are stupid and ignorant (not necessarily true of beat reporters), and after adding in the bias, if a Democrat has to…
mikethemadbiologist | January 12, 2008Once again, someone in the traditional media is projecting their personal opinion onto millions of people without any evidence. Washington Post reporter Dan Balz in one of those hideous 'news analysis' pieces:
Edwards has offended many Democrats with his candidacy. They question his authenticity and see his shift from optimism to anger as the sign of an opportunistic politician. He and his most loyal supporters argue that that's not the case, that the Edwards of 2008 is a reflection of a changed country and his and his wife's changed personal situation.
We're offended, huh? I know some…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2008Here's one example, unintentionally brought to you by NY Times columnist Frank Rich, of how writing political narratives instead of discussing data leads to unsupported conclusions (italics mine):
The continued political import of Iraq could be found in three different polls in the past six weeks -- Pew, ABC News-Washington Post and Wall Street Journal-NBC News. They all showed the same phenomenon: the percentage of Americans who believe that the war is going well has risen strikingly in tandem with the diminution of violence -- from 30 percent in February to 48 percent in November, for…
mikethemadbiologist | January 9, 2008First, before I make too much of the differences between, I agree with Orac that the decision by the OHRP to curtail an excellent healthcare intervention that could prevent thousands of deadly hospital-acquired infections annually is murderously stupid. Like Orac, I have had a couple of ridiculous experiences with human subjects research review boards.
The most ridiculous case involved a study of human Escherichia coli. To get E. coli, erm, fresh from the source, the procedure involves poking your own feces with a sterile swab as they exit your posterior. There are legitimate human…
mikethemadbiologist | January 9, 2008I'm not sure why people are shocked by last night's results; it wasn't that surprising:
As I laid out here, Iowa had a much higher percentage of 18-29 voters than did New Hampshire, probably because the calendar, combined with the time involved in caucusing, meant that students home on break would be able to attend between 6-10 pm on a work night.
What is interesting in that NH had more late breaking voters than Iowa. In Iowa, the late breakers went for Edwards and Clinton, while in NH, they split between Clinton and Obama.
The most surprising thing is that, looking at the exit polls for…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2008Apparently, Matt Stoller, like the Mad Biologist, wants to hear a dog whistle from Obama too (italics mine):
74% of young caucus goers self-identified as Democrats, and 73% self-identified is liberals. Yeah, that's some post-partisan and post-ideological generation coming through the ranks.
This is actually one of my great frustrations with the Obama campaign and Obama supporters. Even when Obama wins a victory on the back of the liberal, creative class vote, both his campaign and his supporters--most of whom are liberals--repeat the mantra that the victory was some sort of post-partisan and…
mikethemadbiologist | January 7, 2008There's been a lot of yap about Obama's slogans of "change" and "hope." Didn't we go through this once before?
By way of maha, I came across this post by Niall Stanage\:
But one important sentence near the end of her [Clinton's] reply was largely overlooked: "We don't need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered."
She sounded the same note again towards the debate's end. When Obama began speaking about people's feeling of being frozen out of politics, and about the need to bring those people back into a "working majority" for change, Clinton interjected.
"Can…
mikethemadbiologist | January 7, 2008I guess the thing that's bothered me about Obama is that I can't get a read on him. Clinton I get, and she has a track record. Ditto Edwards (his record is why I'm only leaning towards him, and not endorsing him). But Obama is a complete cipher.
I've argued before that a good politician acts as foil: that is, people project their goals onto the candidate, whether or not the candidate himself shares those goals. Obama is certainly doing that. The problem is that there is such distrust between rank-and-file Democrats and, well, virtually all Democratic politicians such that some…
mikethemadbiologist | January 6, 2008But Obama supporters should keep something in mind that Jon Swift wrote:
The biggest loser of all was Hillary Clinton. If she can't win in Iowa, where can she win? In every contested race since 1972 (Bill Clinton ran unopposed in 1996), the winner of the Iowa caucuses for the Democrats has gone on to be elected President, except for 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2004 when the winner did not go on to be elected President. Iowans have an uncanny ability to predict which Democrat can win in the general election, which means Hillary's campaign may be doomed.
Snark aside, I wonder…
grrlscientist | January 3, 2008tags: Iowa caucus news, politics, Obama, Democrats
With 97% of the Iowa precincts reporting, there finally is a clear winner;
Barak Obama 38% (16 delegates)
John Edwards 30% (14 delegates) Was John Edwards really in second place? If so, why did he end up with one delegate fewer than Hillary Clinton? Or maybe the delegates were not yet assigned as reported?
Hillary Clinton 29% (15 delegates)
239,000 people turned out for the Democrats, a historic high for Iowa Democrats -- slightly more than 10% of the state's registered voters. (124,000 turned out in 2000). Incidentally, 28% of all Democratic…
mikethemadbiologist | December 30, 2007...and start doing it. Chris Bowers writes:
Few things irritate me more about prominent DLC types than their tendency to preface virtually everything they propose for Democrats with how that something will help Democrats get elected. They do it all the time. I know that an election is close, and electability will be a concern for some... in addition to making Democrats look weak on national security, DLC types like Bayh end up reinforcing a second insidious conservative narrative: that Democrats are a bunch of soulless, liberal elites who think they are better than most of the backward rubes…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007If you visit ScienceBlogs regularly, you've probably read about ScienceBloglings Sheril Kirshenbaum's and Chris Mooney's proposal for a presidential debate about science. There's a lot I like about this proposal, but the reality of what could happen bothers me. First, what I like about the idea.
For much of the last two and half years, I worked at a non-profit organization that focused on infectious disease policy and programs. Science policy--and politics--are important. The idea that every political candidate would actually have to devise a science policy, and perhaps even be judged by…