Politics
clock | September 6, 2008Top Story On John McCain Run Out Of Obligation:
Although his lack of charisma and charm has lately prevented the Arizona senator from grabbing front-page headlines, the tenets of journalistic objectivity made it necessary today to publish a top news story on Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
According to the newspaper's editors, the decision to run the story came after they realized that they had not printed a cover story about Sen. McCain (R-AZ) in a number of months, despite the distinct possibility that he could become the leader of the free world for the next four to eight…
clock | September 6, 2008Where Have I Seen Sarah Palin Before? by Arash Kamangeer:
One of the problems the government faced was opposition from legions of mothers whose sons had been maimed or died in the war. To confront this problem, the government-controlled TV would parade a mother whose son had died in the war in front of the TV on a regular basis. Invariably, this "show mom" would be carrying an infant child and a few other siblings with her. And invariably, she would say something to the effect that "I have given one child to this 'sacred' war, and I am ready to give the next one." Almost always, there would…
clock | September 6, 2008owlz:
Stated or not, the extreme right, the real audience intended to be won over by the Palin choice, will be eagerly anticipating her becoming president at the earliest possible date. They will be looking for her to have influence even while McCain is in office. The cynicism of choosing someone at odds with his one-time positions on major issues for the purpose of getting in the Oval Office could be among the most irresponsible actions ever taken by the presidential candidate of a major party.
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McCain's choice was to give a person from the quite far-right the greatest boost…
clock | September 6, 2008Control of industry by government? I though these guys were against socialism.
Ed Cone:
I've been thinking about a newspaper column on "socialism." I put the word in quotes, because the subject is bogeyman scare-word "socialism," applied to any government program or tax policy opposed by the epitheteer, not the actual, government-control-of-industries definition.
Chris Bowers:
The problem I have is with the incredible cognitive dissonance surrounding "big government" in our national political discourse. Even as we have reached national consensus on nationalizing industries, which is the…
clock | September 6, 2008The Resentment Strategy :
But don't be fooled either by Mr. McCain's long-ago reputation as a maverick or by Ms. Palin's appealing persona: the Republican Party, now more than ever, is firmly in the hands of the angry right, which has always been much bigger, much more influential and much angrier than its counterpart on the other side.
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What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you're supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it's better than you. Or to put it another way, the G.O.P. is still the party of…
clock | September 6, 2008Steven Wells in Guardian yesterday:
This was a cold-bloodedly deliberate attempt at political branding. Palin referred to herself a hockey mom in her carefully scripted and vetted acceptance speech - and not for the first time. In 2004 she boasted: "It's said the only difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is lipstick. So with lipstick on, the gloves come off."
This is a deliberate political coinage. The question being, why? And how exactly does a hockey mom differ from a soccer mom (a phrase that's been around since at least 1983 but became a political cliche during the 1996…
clock | September 6, 2008....that lying is not the only campaign strategy. So is cheating:
In swing-state Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State conducted the biggest purge of voters in history, dumping a fifth of all registrations. Guess their color.
In swing-state Florida, the state is refusing to accept about 85,000 new registrations from voter drives - overwhelming Black voters.
In swing state New Mexico, HALF of the Democrats of Mora, a dirt poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, found their registrations disappeared this year, courtesy of a Republican voting contractor.
In swing states Ohio and Nevada,…
clock | September 6, 2008Dan has an astute observation (phrases bolded by me):
America has always romanticized rural life, and no doubt the McCain campaign has prepared all sorts of comebacks that will turn criticism of Palin into insults against anyone with a rural background.
But I want to talk about another "rural problem:" politics. Effective politics in rural America is based on person-to-person knowledge. You might run on an abstract platform, but you build roads and fix potholes and run sewer lines by knowing people who do stuff. It isn't the way things work in civics texts, but it's the way things work in…
clock | September 6, 2008Jonathan describes, step by step.
I wonder if there are any palindromic sequences to be found?
pharyngula | September 6, 2008When we were in Ecuador, much of the local political discussion was around their efforts to write a new constitution for the country. I'd heard that there were some significantly progressive elements to the work, but this is the first I've seen some of the articles being considered: as is perhaps unsurprising for a nation well-endowed with natural resources and reliant on maintaining those resources to support the economy, they've done something terrific: they've not only written rights for nature (personified as "Pachamama"), but they've acknowledged the importance of evolution.
Art. 1.…
gregladen | September 6, 2008The following are three somewhat drawn out (close to 20 minutes total) videos representing the official response to the Saint Paul RNC police/protester interactions. Here we see the mayor (Chris Coleman) and the Police Chief Harrington giving statements, followed by a question period. The third video, at about 6 minutes, addresses the issue of journalists having been arrested.
Shown in these three videos are what seem to be the two most mealy-mouthed presentations to the press by prominent officials I've seen ... ever, really. I really had no idea Chris Coleman was so inarticulate.
And…
clock | September 6, 2008But if you don't, here are some snippets from his recent posts:
What's missing from the Democratic convention?:
The GOP's attacks on Kerry in 2004 were mocking, scornful, derisive, demonizing and deeply personal -- in speech after speech -- and they were also highly effective. They weren't the slightest bit deterred by the fact that Kerry was a war hero who was wounded multiple times in Vietnam while George Bush and Dick Cheney. . . . weren't. Has there been anything remotely approaching those attacks on McCain by any of the prime-time Democratic speakers?
The GOP assaults on Barack Obama…
clock | September 6, 2008We know they speak in dog-whistles. If you were wondering what Sarah Palin meant by dissing 'community organizers', she was not thinking about Jesus, or Martin Luther King Jr, or Mahathma Gandhi....just so you know who their base is....
'Community Organizers' Is a Dog Whistle:
Matt is absolutely right on the merits, but, make no mistake about it, "community organizers" is code for 'uppity black people who are taking your tax dollars.' One thing that is becoming pretty clear is that the Republicans are making a desperate pitch to the remnants of Nixon's 'silent majority' (which is getting…
clock | September 6, 2008Mockery and satire are sometime the most potent weapons. Nobody likes to be mocked - especially not if there is no possible reasonable response. Nobody wants to be aligned with the side that is consistently mocked in a way that shines light on lies and hypocrisy. The partisans will get mad. But the independents can be turned away from the liars:
daveawayfromhome: Rock, Paper, Scissors:
Republicans play upon our fears to maintain their power, and, as much as Democrats would like it to, careful explanations and reasoned arguments have simply not worked at all with much of the average…
razib | September 6, 2008Wayne Allyn Root's Million-Dollar Challenge:
But the thing Root really wanted to talk about was Obama's grades. Specifically, he was willing to bet a million dollars that he earned a better grade point average at Columbia than his old classmate, and that the only reason Obama went on to Harvard Law School was the color of his skin.
Here's an article in The New York Sun, Obama's Years at Columbia Are a Mystery. For what it's worth, note that:
Mr. Miller acknowledged that Mr. Obama displayed academic achievement at Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude and led the Harvard Law Review.…
clock | September 6, 2008From Shakesville - I thought it deserved to be brought out again, now that a few days have passed and it got burried in the archives:
rrp:
When McCain's campaign announced that they'd chosen Sarah Palin for VP, most people (different flavors of lefties/progressives) that I talked with were delighted. What could be better? An inexperienced, extremely conservative, first-term governor of a small (population-wise) state.
Then the storm hit.
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Progressives tend to like closely argued issues; well maybe we just like to argue. Still, most progressive sorts I know tend to read…
clock | September 6, 2008L.A.Times:
No other country has gone as far as Ecuador in proposing to give trees their day in court, but it certainly is not alone in its recalibration of natural rights. Religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop of Constantinople, have declared that caring for the environment is a spiritual duty. And earlier this year, the Catholic Church updated its list of deadly sins to include polluting the environment.
Ecuador is codifying this shift in sensibility. In some ways, this makes sense for a country whose cultural identity is almost…