voting
mikethemadbiologist | December 8, 2009...Martha Coakley. Although it's close. If I had my druthers (and druthers are hard to come by, what with the economy and all), I would rank the Dems as follows:
1) Khazei
2) Coakley
3) Capuano
While I like Khazei the best, despite some high profile endorsements, he's not going to win (note: I don't want to get into the whole 'pragmatism' thing; the issue is how does your vote get you closest to where you want to be). So for me, it's between Coakley and Capuano.
Capuano has a lot going for him: he is a reliable liberal vote, and he's very good at securing local funding (people seem to…
mikethemadbiologist | November 2, 2009There's an election Tuesday in Massachusetts, and here's who the Mad Biologist endorses.
U.S Senate: This is tough. Both Rep. Mike Capuano and Attorney General Martha Coakley have strengths and weaknesses. Both are reliable liberals, but they have different emphases. Capuano has very good constituent services, and he understands the importance of scientific research to the MA state economy. He does, however, have some shady fundraising associations with Rep. Murtha. Coakley has a very good record as Attorney General, including bringing successful suits against Wall Street firms for…
mikethemadbiologist | April 18, 2009
(from here)
...they would support statehood for the District of Columbia, right? From Jameson Foser:
Every major news organization in the country covered Wednesday's tea parties. And, in doing so, they all ignored the fact that residents of Washington, D.C., are subject to the very conditions that led to the Boston Tea Party.
It's not like this is some big secret. On their way to work on Wednesday, reporters who are based in Washington would have passed countless cars bearing license plates that offer the reminder "Taxation Without Representation." Many of them probably have such a license…
edyong | February 26, 2009During elections, what affects our decision to vote for one politician over another? We'd like to think that it's an objective assessment of many different factors including their various policies, their values, their record and so on. But in reality, voters are just not that rational.
In the past, studies have shown that people can predict which of two politicians will win an election with reasonable accuracy based on a second-long looks at their faces. With a fleeting glance and little purposeful consideration, people make strong judgments about a candidate's competence, that can sway…
mikethemadbiologist | November 13, 2008At the Washington Independent, Aaron Wiener has made a bunch of electoral college maps that show how the candidates would have done if only one particular demographic group had voted. First, registered independents:
Now, self-described moderates:
Not good for the GOP at all. But we're a center-right country! Erm....
Onto college graduates:
With the exceptions of Florida and Indiana, this looks exactly like the actual 2008 map. As I'll discuss tomorrow, you can't really win anymore without college graduates. Demonizing educated people who like science and stuff might not be the best…
mikethemadbiologist | November 5, 2008
Tonight is a triumph for the Coalition of the Sane.
While legitimized insanity has been happening since the Reagan era (Got James Watt?), the last eight years have been dreadful for those not suffering from massive psychological delusions. Our political discourse (such as it is) has moved well beyond arguing over marginal income tax rates. We are, instead, arguing about basic physical, material phenomena: is global warming real; did evolution actually happen; how does human reproduction work?
This is insane. No biologist or climatologist should ever have to waster her time arguing with…
awild | November 4, 2008...and the woman behind me was holding a tearful and very disappointed three year old girl.
"She thought we were going 'boating'," she explained.
mikethemadbiologist | November 4, 2008
V is for voting
Sadly, what I wrote two years ago is still germane. Vote Democratic, so it won't be two years from now:
Time to go vote. We need sane people governing the country, and you sure as hell can't find them in the Republican party. As Andrew Sullivan put it, "This isn't an election, it's an intervention." After years of being called traitors, weaklings, and cowards because we correctly opposed Little Lord Pontchartrain's Excellent Iraqi Adventure, and after being called sluts and whores because we don't think that a to-be-discarded blastula is equal to Michael J. Fox, that…
mikethemadbiologist | November 2, 2008If you're trying to convince black voters to vote Republican, this probably isn't the best way to do it:
Interesting anecdote and probably a testament to ground organization. I have no idea what this means. Friday night (which happens to be the start of our Sabbath) my wife answered the phone to hear a man stating he was from the McCain-Palin campaign. He asked who she was supporting. She replied that we will vote for Obama. He replied with "but he's a f-----g n---er!". Before I get to my wife's response I'll first have to say that I understand desperation and I also understand that this…
mikethemadbiologist | October 29, 2008Note to election officials--a good way to restore faith in the validity of election results is to have the demonstration machine function properly:
How hard is this? Bank machines don't screw up this badly. I think any company that makes a machine that fails repeatedly should be heavily fined for every defective machine. This is ludicrous.
mikethemadbiologist | October 22, 2008Apparently, Digby and I are thinking the same thing. In a response to this post about the anti-Obama bear killing, I wrote that I was worried about violence against Obama supporters.
But, by way of digby, apparently the government is concerned that black people will riot if Obama loses. I'm far more worried about the opposite happening: if Obama wins, Obama supporters will be targeted with arson (or worse), black churches and Democratic party headquarters will be firebombed, and so on (I'm sure there are other 'targets' that I haven't thought of). Given all of the low grade vandalism and…
mikethemadbiologist | October 8, 2008In the midst of the hoopla over how 'in touch' Sarah Palin is supposed to be (all her faux personal touches), I came across this speech by a steelworker at an AFL-CIO convention.
A couple of you might have noticed the image I use in the sidebar:
It's from Norman Rockwell's famous series, the Four Freedoms (this one is freedom of speech). I'll turn the description over to driftglass:
He's nervous. Really nervous.By his tan and his hands and his clothes, you can tell he's a working man. Everyone around him is wearing a tie; his collar is open.Those are his remarks there in his pocket, which…
grrlscientist | September 20, 2008tags: political views, politics, physiology, threat response, psychology, philosophyfight or flight, nature versus nurture
Most Americans have been actively engaged in the frustrating sport of arguing about politics, which often leads to the common refrain; "You just don't get it!" So this made me wonder why people who seem to have similar life experiences can end up with such dramatically different personal philosophies -- philosophies that ultimately affect their political views and voting behavior. Apparently, I am not the only one to wonder about such things, because a paper was just…
mikethemadbiologist | September 16, 2008Enough about the Straight Bullshit Express: here's an election I can believe in. In Massachusetts' Second Suffolk District, the Democratic primary for State Senate features Sonia Chang-Diaz and Dianne Wilkerson. For the very little that it's worth, the Mad Biologist endorses Sonia Chang-Diaz.
On many issues, there isn't much difference between Chang-Diaz and Wilkerson--were Wilkerson to win, it certainly wouldn't be a disaster; Wilkerson's record is pretty good. But here's why I plan to vote for Chang-Diaz:
Chang-Diaz supports publicly funded campaigns; Wilkerson is against them.…
mikethemadbiologist | August 10, 2008This story should, if you care at all about the rule of law, make your blood boil:
I, Galloglas, went to vote today and encountered difficuly. And, it is important to point out that this was not the first time I've run onto problems this year.
When I voted in Missouri's Presidential primary in February, 2008, I took the proper identification to my precinct and attempted to cast my ballot. The identification requirements are spelled out graphically on our Secretary of State's Web Site which can be found at http://www.sos.mo.gov/... /.
And, as I am of the belief that the "Voter Fraud" question…
mikethemadbiologist | June 10, 2008The NY Times has an article recapping how Obama defeated Clinton in the Democratic primary. The article is a prime example of the myopia that afflicts our political press. And it's not what's in the article, but what's missing.
Iraq.
In a story of over 4,000 words purporting to describe the campaign, the word Iraq does not appear once. For a fair number of Democrats, the Iraq War featured prominently in their decision to support Obama. More accurately, Clinton's support for the Iraq War* gave Obama an opening. It might not have been a deal breaker, but it certainly encouraged Democratic…
mikethemadbiologist | May 30, 2008One of things I don't get is why so many Democrats are worried about the primary continuing to the Democratic convention. This is the best thing that could happen to the Democrats.
First of all, don't underestimate how important it is to rank-and-file Democrats that they can actually cast a vote that might actually mean something. But more importantly, it's actually stalled the Republican Slimedozer. Why? Because there's no oxygen left in the room for Republicans. Various people keep pointing out the Republican attack strategies that keep getting trotted out--and they're not sticking.…
mikethemadbiologist | May 21, 2008...in Oregon. Despite all of the talk about how Obama has a problem with white voters, he won Oregon, even though the electorate is essentially entirely white. So what do commentators mean when they say Obama has a problem with white voters?
What they mean is that Obama has a problem with whites whose ancestors or communities participated slavery, 'convict labor'*, lynching, Jim Crow, and segregation (as well as 'massive resistance'). One just doesn't walk away from that kind of brutality, even decades later. These attitudes linger. So why won't the media discuss this openly and honestly…
mikethemadbiologist | May 16, 2008I was reading this post about the possible strengths and weaknesses of Clinton and Obama among different demographic groups, and I grew very annoyed.
Not at Digby, but the whole debate. What's really frustrating about most voting demographic stories (besides the obvious, which is that they don't have much to do with actual governing) is that I have no way to evaluate the claims made. Sometimes there are bar graphs that show how one group compares to another (blacks vs. whites, old vs. young, etc.). On very rare occasion, there is a two-by-two table, but that's still not enough. If news…
mikethemadbiologist | May 15, 2008In the midst of all of the gnashing of teeth and wailing of DOOOOOMMMM!!! because of the never-ending Democratic primary, I still think a contest up to the convention is a good thing (and I've always thought so). There's one thing many pundits as well as Democratic primary partisans seem to have forgotten:
Most Democrats are thrilled that for the first time in nearly thirty years, most of us actually cast a primary vote that matters, even those of us whose favorite candidates dropped out.
As Digby notes:
I realize that a good many people think I'm living in cloud cuckoo-land, but apparently…