Friday, October 31, 2008

A Big Lie I'm getting really tired of hearing

"Obama wants to take your tax money and give it to people who don't pay taxes."

This is a fairly new one, so I might be going out on a limb by ascribing Big Lie status to it already. But I've been hearing it a lot lately, often from people who really ought to know better — people who are usually good at math, like Dave Ramsey.

The problem is, it's not true. Or rather, it's only true if you accept an unreasonably narrow definition of "paying taxes."

It's true that Obama's tax plan would give a refundable tax credit to some people who make too little to pay federal income tax. But those people still pay Social Security payroll taxes, so it's not true that they pay no federal taxes. They also pay state and local sales taxes, and sometimes state income tax as well.

Monday, October 27, 2008

McCain's math

Remember in 2006, when polls were showing the Democrats would likely pick up a bunch of seats, but Karl Rove said he had "the math" to show Republicans would prevail? In hindsight, his math was about as accurate as Superman's Super Math. Apparently Rove has learned from that experience, and now it's McCain's turn to have "the math":
“Those polls have consistently shown me much farther behind than we actually are,” Mr McCain said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press. “We’re doing fine. We have closed [the gap] in the last week. We continue to close this next week. You’re going to be up very, very late on election night.” ....

But in an analysis of the state of the race on Fox News, Karl Rove, the architect of President George W. Bush’s election victories, said Mr Obama now had his biggest lead of the campaign, and was ahead in states with 317 electoral votes, compared with 157 votes for Mr McCain and 270 needed to win the presidency.

According to Mr Rove, Mr Obama was set to capture Ohio, Indiana, Colorado and Virginia. “In order for McCain to win, he’s got a very steep hill to climb,” he said indicating it would be extremely difficult for the Republican to turn round a national deficit of more than six points.
A McCain presidency is still possible, of course — but so is a snowfall in June. I don't have "the math," but here's some math to ponder. Based on state-by-state polls, Electoral Vote puts the current electoral college standings as Obama 375, McCain 157. It also shows that McCain is in a tough spot, behind in some must-win states. Unless he takes Pennsylvania, which looks unlikely, McCain needs Virginia to win; without it, even taking Florida and Ohio is unlikely to put him over the top. (He'd have to take every other state that's within the margin of error, and take Colorado, where Obama has been pretty consistently ahead.) And that means we may get to go to bed early after all, because Virginia's polls close at 7 pm Eastern time.

This doesn't mean we can get complacent, of course. While Obama currently has a 6% lead in Virginia, that state isn't normal Democratic territory, so it's hard to believe it could be anything but close. If McCain takes Virginia, then get-out-the-vote efforts in traditional swing states like Ohio and Florida become vitally important, and it's conceivable that final victory could hinge on smaller states like Indiana and Missouri. If you have some spare time and a pocket calculator, you might want to run through some of these scenarios, just for fun.

Friday, October 24, 2008

All hat no cattle

Not only has the McCain campaign spent $150,000 on clothes for Sarah Palin, but, apparently, Palin's makeup artist is the highest paid staffer on the McCain/Palin campaign.

Partly, of course, it's that there's a ridiculous double standard in politics. Male politicians can wear the same three medium-priced suits and three neckties over a whole campaign. A female politician runs a risk if she's ever seen wearing the same thing twice, and her wardrobe choices are inevitably going to be dissected. The appearance of a female candidate is a far bigger issue. Which is flat-out sexist, but it's reality.

But to me, there's something else going on here. Republicans have spent so long focusing on image and not on substance that, finally, they've actually forgotten the difference.

Once upon a time, it was a canny strategy. Reagan and his staff were masters of the art of overwhelming facts with image. There's the famous story about Leslie Stahl, back in the 80s, doing a story that was critical of Reagan's use of images that contradicted facts.

"I knew the piece would have an impact, if only because it was so long: five minutes and 40 seconds, practically a documentary in Evening News terms," Stahl later wrote. I worried that my sources at the White House would be angry enough to freeze me out."

That's not what happened. Reagan adviser Dick Darman called from the White House to tell her how much they had loved the piece.

Stahl replied, incredulously, "Didn't you hear what I said?"

Darman replied, "Nobody heard what you said. You guys in Televisionland haven't figured it out, have you? When the pictures are powerful and emotional, they override if not completely drown out the sound. I mean it, Lesley. Nobody heard you."

This, as much as anything, is how Republicans have done so well in the last 30 years. They figured out that it's not about good policy or even popular policy. It's all about pretty pictures. You go on TV, you look presidential, and it almost doesn't matter what else you do.

George W. Bush raised this almost to the level of camp. For beginning to end the man's presidency has been, as Michael Stipe might say, a simple prop to occupy our time, from the pretend ranch Karl Rove told him to buy for photo-op purposes (he bought it just before running for president and is selling it as soon as he leaves office) to the cowboy hats and other costume items (not only is Bush a rich kid from a prominent New England family, he's actually afraid of horses).

And I guess special mention does need to go to the ultimate campy joke candidate, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had a pothole dug in a street in San Jose so he could be photographed filling it in. Bonus for also wearing white pants for the photo-op (I'm no road maintenance expert, but I'm pretty sure tar is black and sticky).

Maybe it's just that, despite the press's best efforts, this election really does hinge on issues, not images. Maybe it's that Sarah Palin is so obviously a phony that no amount of spending on her appearance can make her seem otherwise. But the usual Republican distractions aren't working this time, it would seem.

And it would seem they've forgotten how to do anything else.

Friday cat blogging


Gladys investigates a webcam.

Things that rhyme with "hope"

Monday, October 20, 2008

Equation 2008

Friday, October 17, 2008

Why do Republicans hate America?

Apparently, Sarah Palin knows which parts of America are pro-America, and which parts of America are anti-America. In North Carolina, she said this:

"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."


I'm really damn tired of Republicans holding themselves up as the only ones who "love America" and, in doing so, ironically insulting and dismissing 50% of the country.

I'm tired of being told that the part of America I live in doesn't count because I vote wrong and don't drive a pickup and don't think the earth is only 6000 years old.

I might add that North Carolina, and most of the other states Sarah Palin thinks make up the "real America," weren't very "pro-American" when they tried to secede at gunpoint in 1860. Glass houses, anyone?

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Cat fort

Seagull made Gladys a cardboard box fort. One of his more brilliant ideas.

They're going to lose

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Are you registered? Are you sure?

A lot of states have purged inactive voters from their voter rolls. If you're planning on voting in November, especially if you haven't voted recently, you should make sure you're still registered. In some states registration deadlines have passed, but in others there's still time if you act soon.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Fear and loathing

You see a lot of false equivalencies in the media. It's sort of their creed: if you report that Republicans have done something that makes them look bad, you must immediately find a way to say that Democrats do it also. That is how you seem "fair." If the Republicans are, for instance, lying through their teeth, and the Democrats aren't, you're obligated to say something like "Republicans are claiming that Ted Kennedy is a serial killer, but Democrats today used a very generous interpretation of their tax plan, so both sides lie."

For instance, on ABC's "this week," Paul Krugman (who is brilliant) and Cokie Roberts (who is a complete tool) had the following exchange:

Krugman: This is not just about McCain and what he did. The fact of the matter is, for a long time we have had a substantial fraction of the Republican base that just does not regard the idea of Democrats governing as legitimate. Remember the Clinton years. It was craziness, right? They were murderers, they were drug smugglers, and the imminent prospect of what looks like a big Democratic victory would drive a lot of these people crazy even if Sarah Palin wasn't saying these inflammatory things. It's going to be very ugly after the election.

Roberts: On both sides that's true. I think that you've also had a huge number of Democrats who think that the Republicans are illegitimate, and that was particularly true after the 2000 election, and to some degree after 2004. And so you really do have at the core of each party people who are not ready to accept the verdict of the election.

Krugman: I reject the equivalence.


Jeez.

I'm just going to quote Hilzoy's response in full, because it's better than I could put it:

I do too, on two counts. First, there is no analogy between 1992 and 2000. In 1992, there was no question that Bill Clinton won the election. He had 370 electoral votes to Bush's 168. He got 5.6% more of the popular vote than Bush. It was not close.

In 2000, by contrast, Gore won the popular vote, and the electoral vote turned on Florida, whose results in turn were decided by the Supreme Court. And the decision in Bush v. Gore was very hard to explain as a principled decision: justices in the majority not only abandoned long-held positions on federalism, but announced that their decision should not be cited as a precedent in future cases. I really do not want to re-argue the 2000 election. But I think that the idea that there's some sort of equivalence between doubting the fairness of the 2000 and 1992 elections is absurd.

Second, while a lot of Democrats had deep concerns about the outcome of Bush v. Gore, the overwhelming majority of us accepted that the courts had the right to adjudicate questions of law. As a result, most of us accepted the idea that whether or not George W. Bush had actually won the election in straightforward common-sense terms, he was entitled under the law to be our President.

Or, in short: we had a lot more reason to regard George W. Bush as illegitimate than the Republicans had to regard Clinton as illegitimate. Despite that fact, most of us accepted the fact that, like it or not, he was our President. We did not go around claiming that he had killed one of his closest associates, or was a drug smuggler, or hung crack pipes from his Christmas tree.

There is no equivalency here. None at all.

Maybe next week I'll take on the (cough) challenging task of explaining why there is no equivalence between saying that Clinton was a murderer and saying that George W. Bush is a war criminal. Hint: it's the same reason there would be no equivalence between saying that Bush held up a convenience store and saying that Clinton was unfaithful to his wife.


Amen.

I want to add, though, that this seems, to me, to point out a distinct difference between the Democratic base and the Republican base.

I think, for the most part, we see politics as the clash of competing ideas. Which is why a lot of alleged Democrats and liberals were willing to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt for so long. Those of us on the "angry left" (the "dirty fucking hippies" to use Atrios's phrase) were left helplessly pointing out that Bush was lying us into war, that his administration was staffed with incompetent cronies, that his proposed social security policies were presented dishonestly and were actually a big gift to Wall Street at the expense of the least among us. Eventually, more and more people came around to our view, because it got really hard to avoid--Bush and his minions didn't just represent an alternate set of proposals we could battle honestly, they represented something much more insidious, dishonest, and destructive.

People who reached this conclusion did so almost entirely on policy grounds. Bush's policies, and their results, just got so hateful and disastrous that open-minded people could no longer ignore it, which is why Bush's approval ratings are now dipping to sub-Nixonian levels.

In short, it wasn't that we hate him and therefore we look for reasons to justify that hate. For the most part, we started out giving him the benefit of the doubt and found that his actions left hating him as the only honest option.

Contrast that to the way conservatives, even allegedly "mainstream" ones, treated Bill Clinton. From the very, very beginning, they accused him of having murdered Vince Foster, of being a drug smuggler, of operating death squads in Arkansas to whack his political enemies, of somehow having committed impeachable offenses in a 1974 Arkansas land deal on which he lost money. They hated him with a passion that bordered on psychosis.

And it clearly wasn't that they hated him because of his policies, or even because they'd heard that he was a murderer or a rapist or a drug smuggler. They hated him because he was THE ENEMY.

And this is my point. The conservative base doesn't see politics as a clash of competing legitimate ideas. It sees politics, and everything else, as a clash between good and evil. When George W. Bush said "you're either with us or you're against us," he wasn't just talking about that one moment in history. Conservatives think that about literally everything.

During the Cold War they were able to conveniently structure their worldview along capitalist vs. communist lines. When that ended, they had ten years to wait for al Qaeda to offer them a new group to hate. So they spent the 90s adrift. And, rather than adapt to newer, more complex realities and engage in an honest debate with Democrats and liberals about how to move forward, they just cast American politics in the same tribalist terms.

They hate Bill Clinton because, to them, the whole world is a Saturday morning cartoon, populated by Good Guys and Bad Guys. They see the world like I did when I was 5. And their identity as Good Guys requires them, at all times, to be fighting against some historic and unprecedented EVIL FORCE. After the cold war, they conveniently and suddenly had a Democratic president to hate. So, they believed all that shit about him not because they found it plausible, but because it conveniently fit into their need for the opposition not just to be the opposition, but to be THE BAD GUY.

In short, it had nothing whatsoever to do with policy (Clinton actually agreed with them on a number of issues, like welfare reform). They hated him because that's how they feel about the enemy, and all those ridiculous slurs fit neatly into their need to justify their hate.

So no, there is no equivalence. The difference is categorical. We feel that a lively and engaged and honest policy debate is essential to effective governance. They feel that He-Man needs to crush and defeat Skeletor.

Conservatism in the 1990s had a distinctly anti-authority slant. The fringe of that movement was utterly convinced that Clinton was a tyrant who was going to come take their guns away and make them bow down to the UN or something. Somewhat more "mainstream" conservatives, at the very least, felt that it was the epitome of patriotism not just to disagree with Clinton, but to absolutely loathe and detest him, to regard him as illegitimate despite his having twice been legitimately elected president.

And then, bizarrely, after a Republican got "elected" president, they did a 180, and became hardcore authoritarians, regarding any criticism of the new president, however mild, as not only unpatriotic, but treasonous. the "good guy/bad guy" lines were redrawn: Bush was the Good Guy. Al Qaeda was the Bad Guy--and so was anybody who said anything bad about Bush the noble hero and his quest to vanquish the Bad Guys.

As usual, there is no such thing as legitimate disagreement. It's always good vs. evil.

And the hateful, Munich-beer-hall style crowds at McCain/Palin rallies is a sign of how this is going to manifest in the Obama/Biden administration. It'll be the 90s all over again but with a "terrorist" flavor.

To these crowds of crazy-base-world conservatives, Barack Obama is the Bad Guy for the same reason Bill Clinton is--he's the opposition, and there is no such thing as legitimate opposition. He has a Muslim-sounding name, which feeds nicely into their preexisting framework of Muslim Bad Guys, but even if he didn't, they would still be calling him a "terrorist" because to them, "terrorist" is simply a synonym for "Bad Guy." And any Democrat about to be elected president would by definition play that role for them.

I don't know exactly why they always see things this way. Maybe tribalism is built into our genes by evolution (in ancient times it made us more likely to protect our own genetic line, and thus those genes survived). Maybe fundamentalist Christianity has something to do with it, casting the universe as it does in stark good vs. evil terms (witness the rumors that Obama might be the antichrist).

I suppose we can congratulate ourselves on having, to a much greater degree, transcended our tribalist evolutionary roots and come to see the world in more nuanced terms, as a clash of competing ideas rather than a war between GI Joe and Cobra. Because there is absolutely no equivalence. We are not like them. (And, to their credit, some conservative intellectuals, like David Brooks and Christopher Buckley, have begun to acknowledge that the intellectual conservatism of decades past has been replaced by lizard-brained reactionary ignorance--Buckley has even endorsed Obama).

They are the small-minded thugs. We strive to be ruled by the better angels of our natures. Keep fighting the good fight. This time at least, we're about to win.

Friday, October 10, 2008

The Road to Obama

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Friday Cat Blogging


Disturbed in her slumber, Gladys responds with a cat's primary defense mechanism — extreme cuteness.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

A quick plug

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a couple of pointers to layman's explanations of the financial crisis, including a This American Life broadcast from May. Those of you who enjoyed that show might be interested to know that they've done another one, covering some of the more recent developments.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Misery loves company

Think the economic situation in the U.S. is frightening? Consider Iceland. It was once a poor country, but a long business and investment boom, starting in the 1990s, gave it one of the highest per capita wealth figures in the world. A UN report in 2007 named it the best country to live in. As the credit crunch turns global, though, it's all coming unraveled. The kronur, Iceland's currency, has fallen by a third in the last month. This has raised fears of food shortages, since Iceland is heavily dependent on imports. Inflation is in the double digits. Many people have loans in denominated in foreign currencies, as as the kronur falls, their loan balances rise.

In the U.S., we're lucky in that we're insulated somewhat from the effects of currency fluctuations. We still produce many of our goods, especially food, domestically, and our economy is fairly diverse. Not so for smaller countries, which are more dependent on trade. And perhaps that's the real moral here — trade can bring great wealth, but it also creates vulnerability. As we transition towards a "service economy," as opposed to one that manufactures tangible products, we have to think hard about the effects of becoming more dependent on the rest of the world for basic goods.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Pretend maverickosity


Rolling Stone has kind of a devastating article about John McCain's real life story, which is awfully different from the version he's spent decades cultivating.

Some excerpts:

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

...

Back on campus, McCain's short fuse was legend. "We'd hear this thunderous screaming and yelling between him and his roommate — doors slamming — and one of them would go running down the hall," recalls Phil Butler, who lived across the hall from McCain at the academy. "It was a regular occurrence."

When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant — even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to "bilge out" because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy's commandant stepped in. Calling McCain "spoiled" to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.

"He was a huge screw-off," recalls Butler. "He was always on probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and his grandfather — they couldn't exactly get rid of him."

...

During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain's wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was "getting a little thin up there." McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.

In the Senate — where, according to former GOP Sen. Bob Smith, McCain has "very few friends" — his volcanic temper has repeatedly led to explosive altercations with colleagues and constituents alike. In 1992, McCain got into a heated exchange with Sen. Chuck Grassley over the fate of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. "Are you calling me stupid?" Grassley demanded. "No, I'm calling you a fucking jerk!" yelled McCain. Sen. Bob Kerrey later told reporters that he feared McCain was "going to head-butt Grassley and drive the cartilage in his nose into his brain." The two were separated before they came to blows. Several years later, during another debate over servicemen missing in action, an elderly mother of an MIA soldier rolled up to McCain in her wheelchair to speak to him about her son's case. According to witnesses, McCain grew enraged, raising his hand as if to strike her before pushing her wheelchair away.


The whole thing is worth your time.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Lowering the bar

Over at Electoral Vote, The Votemaster has this comment about the upcoming VP debate:
"The Republicans have been bad-mouthing [Sarah Palin] for days now to lower expectations so that if she manages to put both a subject and verb in 50% of her sentences they can say she beat expectations. In truth, although she is not experienced in national affairs, she is not stupid. You can't be elected governor with an IQ of 90. She is unlikely to make many gaffes. The real fear is that she will make one humdinger of a gaffe...."

I think he's right that they're trying to lower expectations — otherwise why would her own campaign leak that she's doing badly in rehearsals? Even if she doesn't commit any major gaffes, though, and manages to beat expectations, it's hard to imagine her exhibiting the kind of grasp of international affairs that would reassure people about her readiness to be president.

Incidentally, while you're over there check out the state-by-state polling. North Carolina is a statistical tie. Who would have thought North Carolina could be in play? Even if McCain ends up taking that state, which is likely, this is still good news for Obama — it means the Republicans have to spend time and money defending that state, resources that won't be available elsewhere.

Hosted by KEENSPOT: Privacy Policy