Song of the Year

First runner-up

Second runner-up

Ham's baloney

I've promised a couple of people a review of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, and two is more than enough for me (it's basically the sum total of everyone I know) so I plan to deliver one here.  However, it won't be a particularly extensive review, as I was with my entire family and didn't have my monocular viewing aid with me, which means I didn't read most of the postings in any detail.  For more complete reviews--which I'll often use myself--see these from Daniel Phelps and John Scalzi, who includes a photo tour so you can see much of the museum for yourself.  

The Creation Museum is the brainchild--if one could go so far--of Ken Ham, the Australian leader of the young-earth creationist outfit Answers in Genesis.  I had heard of Ham before, but wasn't aware of the extent of his popularity, which he apparently draws from frequent appearances on Christian radio.  "Young-earth creationism" is an important distinction; unlike supporters of "intelligent design" whose dispute is chiefly with biological evolution, YECs argue that the Earth is only 6,000-10,000 years old, putting them at odds with most of the academic canon, from geology and anthropology to astronomy and linguistics.  Back in my days as a college evangelical, we viewed them as well-meaning but misguided relics, and rarely considered their arguments worthwhile.  The feeling appears to be mutual; a brief section of the Creation Museum is dedicated to slamming advocates of other kinds of creationism as lukewarm accomodationists.  

If there's one thing people are likely to know about Ham and the museum from popular media coverage of the opening in May 2007, it's his preoccupation with dinosaurs, particularly his claim that dinosaurs and humans co-existed.  This has two purposes.  The first is promotional; people, especially kids, think dinosaurs are cool, although the popularity of dinos in the public imagination has declined from the early '90s.  The second, more critical, purpose is for Ham to distinguish himself from earlier generations of young-earthers.  That dinosarus existed and became extinct before humans walked the earth and don't seem to be mentioned in the Bible has long been a major stumbling block for those trying to believe it happened within a theoretical 6,000 year Earth history.  Many reverted to believing God created the world with "apparent age," which, as Slacktivist describes here, becomes an indisputable matter of personal faith.  Ham isn't going to be satisfied by personal belief.  He wants to establish fundamentalist Christianity as the objectively true religion, and thus force the acceptance of his social agenda.  

Curiously, once you leave the main hall and enter the walking tour of the museum, the dino motif recedes to nothingness.  Ham, you see, reads the Bible very literally, so the various mythical beasts mentioned in Job and Psalms must have been dinosaurs because, well...uh...QED?  At any rate, there are none in the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  The YECs are animated by the belief that this section of the Bible must be literally true or else the entire world of Christian theology will be undercut, so the Creation Museum spends most of its time telling and retelling these chapters in various ways.

I was actually quite surprised at the lack of time spent bashing evolutionary scientists and promoting an overt right-wing social agenda.  Sure, there's the requisite warnings about the epidemic of internet porn and abortions blamed on God-denying scientists, but there's also a reminder about the Fall of Man bringing hunger, poverty and war, though perhaps this distinction is meant to claim that these problems are pre-determined, making it futile to try and stop them.  (Why this couldn't apply more broadly, who knows?)  And this occurs within the first few exhibits; most of the rest of the museum's content is Ham's effort to make a positive case for his own hypothesis, however exceedingly flimsy it is. 

And you have to admire his steadfastness if not his creativity.  Ham relies on the Great Flood of Genesis 6-9 to explain away almost every anomaly inconsistent with young-earthism, from the distribution of fossils to continental drift to the formation of major geological events like the Grand Canyon.  This almost necessarily creates a much greater prominence for the Deluge in young-earth theology as well; the literal fact of God wiping out most living things in a fit of jealousy may not be the kind of thing you want to remind people of too often.  But Ham doesn't jsut rely on Bible stories for his theories; sometimes you have to do things yourself.  So he invents the existence of "post-Flood catastrophes" which aren't recorded anywhere.  If anything else, this is the museum of idle speculation; if you're dying to see any demonstration or experiment on how a worldwide deluge could've done all the things Ham claims, there's nothing to be found.  Even Ham's own confidence wavers from time to time; one posting on the migration of life after the end of the flood is weighed down with "probably"s and "must have"s.

Little about the presentation was different from what I expected.  There are brief recitations of many erstwhile young-earth arguments, like the amount of sodium in oceans or the decaying of the earth's magnetic field.  Background about the scientific issues in dispute is seldom given, confirming my earlier contention that this literature exists to reassure people who want to believe in YECism that someone is out there doing the legwork, and they needn't worry about it.  The production values were generally respectable, although the 'museum's only artifact to speak of was a Hebrew Torah taken from Iraq (what this has to do with creationism is anyone's guess.)  However, the short film shown in the museum's "Special Effects Theater," allegedly a light-hearted satire, drew only a scattering of guffaws from the sympathetic audience.  Some things seem out of the reach of fundamentalist Christians.  

Overall, I didn't come away as angry at these folks as I thought I might.  Perhaps I was too tired to care.  Or perhaps the one redeemable thing in the museum softened my view; a posting reminding people that humanity's common ancestors means we are all part of the human family and that "God forbids abuse of any person."  I don't really trust anyone to make the obvious logical connections, but I had a little brighter time knowing they were there.  Truthfully, I don't see much value in getting too hysterical over the existence of young-earth creationists in general.  The fundamentalist Christians and the so-called "New Atheists" have a nice symbiotic game going, where the more outrageous actions of one reinforces the will of the other to raise the bar.  I'll leave that for someone else to play.  

Ho Ho Ho

Merry Yule'n'all to you'n'ems.  Sorry posting has been light, but it'll probably continue for a bit. 

In the meantime, the dreaded family trip to Ken Ham's Creation Museum is coming up on Saturday, so you have that to look forward to.  

Rick Roll

Obama's pick of dough-headed pop theologian Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration has been all the talk in the liberal blogosphere the past few days.  Warren is moderately less loathsome than some other right-wing evangelical priests because of his work on AIDS, global poverty and the environment, but all anyone seems to care about, of course, are his conventional reactionary stances on the Big Two; abortion and homosexuality. 

This action, and the subsequent reaction, tells us less about Obama than it does about liberals.  Identity politickers are often the most enthusiastic boosters of donkey-worshipping lesser evilism, and lefties are well-accustomed by now to hearing of our secret bigotry for not doing the greatest deed possible for social justice, voting straight-ticket Democratic.  Watching them flail furiously while Obama tosses them over the edge would make a less modest man say "I could've warned you."  (Glennzilla, as usual, hits it out of the park.)

Liberals have sat by patiently while Obama mostly appionts a collection of cruise missile liberals, neocon holdovers, and big-business lackeys to man his administration but this, this, is a slight up with which they shall not put.  Perhaps, if they had been a little less demure, the situation  wouldn't have reached this point.  ("First they came for labor, but I said nothing, because all of those working-class people are probably homophobes anyway.")

Ah, there's another point. Liberals are more than happy to play the intellectual totalitarian game when the Big Two are at stake.  The treatment of Warren here reminds us that, regardless of how your position on any number of other issues, if you're not on board with the Big Two, then you can sod off.  Not only does this do little for achieving any other progressive goal, I really doubt it does anything to hurry the pubilc acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships.  Yes, we can wait for older generations to die off and be replaced by younger, more tolerant ones, but that's going to be a mighty slow process. Winning now is going to mean changing the minds of people who presently disagree with you.  That's not likely to happen if you're intent on declaring their entire political person anathema and beneath contempt.  

Happy generic Holiday

I should first note that I'm not going to give any credit, begrudging or otherwise, to the disingenuous "War on Christmas" silliness of the right-wing Christians. It is, I have long suspected, an invention of the Business Right designed to head off creeping anti-consumerist sentiment among evangelicals and fundamentalists. I can remember a time not too long ago when the main complaint among Christians was that Christmas had become too commercialized and materialistic, and they instead wanted to focus on personal and spiritual gifts. But, in a world where our economy is heavily dependent on your need to buy the acceptance of others with the latest gadget or expensive diamond, this subversive cancer obviously couldn't be allowed to spread. Hence, the War on Christmas was invented to remind good Christians of their duty to capitalism.

But, I must say...

The insistence of our moribund commercial culture to refer to a generic "holiday" really is reaching absurdly asinine levels. I appreciate the goal of being as inclusive as possible, but really, it's not going to kill you to recognize what these mysterious "holidays" you speak of specifically are. On a personal level, perhaps people find it intrusive to ask which holiday you recognize before greeting you, and I pity the poor clerk who asks the wrong fundie Christian and gets a sermon. But, for larger audiences, I don't see any harm in mixing it up a bit. I reckon this would make people from a non-Christian background feel more included rather than lumping them all into a grand homogeneous consumer bacchanalia. Then again, that's rather the point, isn't it?

Credit where it's due, I've actually seen a Best Buy ad reference Hanukkah. That's a step in the right direction.

The Republic strike

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For the past five days, workers have occupied the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago after the factory closed down when Bank of America cut off its credit. Bank of America, which received over $25 billion as part of the financial industry bailout, had initially refused to pay the severance and vacation money it owed the factory workers.  Negotiations continue, though reports of a deal may be premature.  

One of the articles at Socialistworker.org mentioned how much of the gathered media scampered away yesterday to cover the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, which, coincidentally or not, came one day after Blagojevich appeared in support of the strikers.  

I can see that we are gonna be friends*

I've been thinking a bit over the weekend about this strip of the webcomic xkcd, which is a witty observation of the male phenomenon often called the Nice Guy (so named for his predilection for uttering some variation of the following:  "I don't understand why women won't date me, I'm such a nice guy.")  In lieu of being straightforward about his romantic intentions with women, the Nice Guy pretends to be magnanimously making friends with them, only revealing his ulterior motive periodically to denounce her boyfriends as jerks.  It's pretty easy to see why this guy is an annoyance, not to mention the fact that someone with such an inflated self-image already has a relationship with the person of his dreams, and doesn't need another one.  In college I had the voyeuristic pleasure of reading the blog of a friend's friend who fit this caricature like a glove and marvel at how unaware he seemed to be of this fact. (Of course, he's probably a bigshot TV producer now, and therefore gets the last laugh at me).

Nonetheless, this makes me a little uncomfortable because I don't really understand the impulse to draw these great lines between friendship and romantic interest. Back in my evangelical bubble days, men and women were strictly segregated, and it was generally understood that they have no reason to truck with each other except for the biblically-mandated mating hunts.  I never quite understood how this worked.  "I'd like to spend the rest of my life with you, but you're not my friend."  Or, "have my children, but don't speak to me."  In the the world of evangelical gender relations, men are beset by a litany of Man Problems that they certainly shouldn't trust women to be of any help.  The women, I guess, were kept around to be baby machines.  (I wonder now what the women were told; I'll have to find someone and ask someday.)  I have to admire their faith in the power of marriage; these people truly believed in miracles. 

Then there is the equally ornerous inverse of the Nice Guy you find in popular laddie culture, who subscribes to the "ladder theory" of interpersonal relationship.  This guy, by contrast, studiously avoids becoming friends with women, claiming "once she thinks of you as a friend, she won't put out."  They advise their younger charges in the backslapping jock fraternity on ways to stay out of this mythical "friend zone." 

All of this is fairly nonsensical to me.  I persist in the fairly peculiar belief that women are people, and as such are not dramatically different from men-people.  Not having had the experience, I can't really say why two people decide to take their relationship to that special plane, but I've always imagined that, were there sexual tastes inclined differently, they would still get on well with each other.  What makes the Nice Guy so odious, I hope, is his dishonesty, not the radical idea that men and women can't be acquainted without thinking about sex (though perhaps he never truly believed this, anyway). There is understandably some tension between single hetero members of the opposite sex, but it's nothing more honesty and less adherence to pop psychology can't dispel.

*I'm breaking my vow to only write about sex and dating issues on Valentine's Day.  Well, it's only two months away, so maybe this can count for this year's entry.

In good company

Last Wednesday, over 100 nations gathered in Norway to sign a treaty renouncing the use of cluster bombs.  Unsurprisingly, the United States wasn't one of them.  We need more efficent methods to maim and kill poor people; the ordinary ones aren't getting the job done all that well.  This, of course, is the kind of rebuff we usually show for the international community, which goes unremarked upon at the time but will be dismissed as Totally Unserious when it ends up in a Noam Chomsky book years later. 

"Oh boo-hoo Blame-America-Firster!" the jingoes inevitably cry.  "Uhmerica wasn't the only nation to turn down the cluster munitions treaty!"  Well, they're right.  We were joined by such leading lights of Enlightenment as Russia, China, Pakistan, and Israel.  Hey, if you line it up, it surely forms some kind of Axis.  A bit crooked but...hey, Axis of Crooked.  I think it'll work.

I wish we'd all been Ready

The cover of Daniel Radosh's book Rapture Ready:  Inside the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture looks like one you might find in a Christian bookstore, although you probably cannot.  It depicts a grossly out-of-scale scene of a pre-teen girl in a pink dress smiling and floating happily above a row of trees and into the blue sky.  And there are sparkles.  Always with the sparkles.  Unfortunately, it also betrays the serious nature of the book, which begins with a jaunt through the world of gospel golf balls and other "Jesus Junk" but develops into a serious meditation on the possibilty of Christian culture as a moderating bridge to the rest of the world. 

Most people are familiar with the existence of "Christian rock" music, but the world of Christian culture hardly begins or ends there.  For virtually every kind of popular entertainment you can imagine, there is probably a comparable "Christian" version of it.  Books, movies, comedy, skateboarding, raves, superhero comics, you name it.  As far as I know, there are no Christian sports leagues; just professional wrestling.  While the quality of most of these ventures is about what you'd expect, Radosh often has a more forgiving verdict; the Christian wrestlers, he notes, put on "a hell of a show."  

Radosh, a humanist Jew from New York, began his journey with few expectations that he might find anything redeemable.  Curiously, it's his encounter with Christian music, the erstwhile whipping post of the secular world, that gives Radosh his minor epiphany.  Specifically, Radosh lands at Cornerstone, the music and art mega-festival in Bushnell, IL hosted by Jesus People USA, the original Jesus hippies.  Not only does he find more talented performers making genuinely good art, but also people eager to challenge right-wing Christian orthodoxy.  Logic would tell us that these two things are not coincidental, and Radosh notes several cases of the Christian culture industry's struggle to keep its artists on the straight and narrow path of promoting social conservative values. 

Radosh becomes greatly enamoured of Cornerstone and many of the people he finds there, including the incomparable Aaron Weiss of the post-hardcore band mewithoutyou, recalling it fondly in many of the subsequent chapters of the book.  He argues that embracing "transformational" Christian artists who are less concered with proselytizing than about creating reflections on personal faith is a way for the secular world to encourage a moderating trend in the Christian world at large.  

It's a nice sentiment, but probably unrealistic.  Notably absent from Radosh's discussion of Christian musicians is Sufjan Stevens.  This is largely because Radosh gets entangled in the oft-debated question of what qualifies as Christian music.  There is a simple answer in practice; Christian music is produced by anyone who has even the most fleeting association with the Christian music industry, even if that only means playing Cornerstone festival and nothing else, which is true in a good many cases.  Stevens doesn't, so he isn't counted as Christian music, even though he was a member of Danielson Famile, which is.  It's complicated.  The point is, even though Stevens has become an indie superstar, he's still largely unknown to the general public.  The mainstream public, like the Christian public, likes its art easily digestable.  Radosh may enjoy Over the Rhine as a hipster-aware New Yorker, but getting them beyond that point is probably a lost cause.

Radosh also has many flattering things to say about the world of Christian comedy, where he finds many surprisingly frank commentaries on living with faith.  And his daydreaming of an honest Christian sitcom probably has a greater chance of coming true, with Hollywood chasing the post-Mel Gibson Jesus dollars.  Again, though, it won't come to fruition until the current gatekeepers--who are naturally more concerned with portrayals of non-conforming Christians than any kind of secular depravity-have passed on.  

Reading Rapture Ready felt like going through a time warp.  I saw mewithoutyou play supporting their first album six years ago this winter.  I've also seen Over the Rhine and Bill Mallonnee of Vigilantes of Love, who Radosh touts in the book as well as the companion website.  Any of them stack up quite well to comparable non-Christian counterparts, though it's quite unfair to make the distinction.  Luckily, though, I've never been to a Bibleman live performance.  Let's hope it stays that way.  

Christian pop culture is becoming more pervasive; fifteen years ago none of this stuff was visible in my hometown, and the Christian bookstore still primarily sold books.  Now, my family is dragging me to the Creation Museum.  However, there is a chance that conservative evangelical forces will be eaten by their own monster.  Many members of the "emerging church" of younger evangelicals cut their teeth on Jesus junk as kids, and have set out to erase the distinction between Christian and secular culture, just as fundamentalist skeptics of embracing popular culture warned against.  Never tiring of imitation, however, reactionaries are even copying the tattoos-and-beer-drinking ethos of the emergants into their old authoritarian package.  This chameleon is difficult to quash. 

In Soviet Canuckistan, liberal hawk pundits you!

Less than two months after winning re-election, Stephen Harper's Tory government looks to be on the verge of falling after a series of rapid-fire economic blunders, including a proposal to end public financing of political parties.  

In case the discovery that Canada has public financing of parties--and it's apparently so politcally ironclad that opposing it helped bring down the government--has made you yearn to move North again, bear this in mind.  The new Liberal-NDP coalition government could be led by none other than Michael Ignatieff.  Liberal hawk idiots may be able to fall great distances upward in America, but at least they have so far been unable to achieve head of government.  So while you may not be moving to Canada, Thomas Friedman, Peter Beinart, and Matt Yglesias are all packing their bags.  

Juxtaposition

Banner headline at NYTimes.com right now.

• Day of Reckoning as India Toll Passes 170

Further down the page, under the "more news" heading

• Hundreds Feared Dead in Riots in Nigeria
  

I've been a bit perplexed by the American media's wall-to-wall coverage of the ongoing tragedy in Mumbai.  There surely hasn't been this much coverage of dead non-Americans since the Boxing Day Tsunami, and that was certainly a tragedy of a much more immense level.  While I'd like to think otherwise, I don't expect this signals the sudden start of new concern in the American press for the plight of people in the non-Anglophone world.  There are specifically two things at work here. 

1.  The Mumbai attacks were "terrorism" and that word, of course, piques special interest in its paradoxical role of giving Americans new things to be terrified about. 

2.  The attacks occured at two upscale luxury hotels, and several international business leaders were either victims or were at the scene.  This certainly attracts more ruling-class interest than hundreds of worthless Nigerian peasants being trampled to death, but even the London tube or Madrid train attacks didn't hold the media attention over several days the way this past week's events have.  

Shorter New(speak) York Times

Obama Tilts to Center, Inviting a Clash of Ideas

• Orthodoxy is diversity

The prophets and practitioners of Broderist Magical Centrism have wasted little time in applauding the incoming president's hassle-free embrace of center-right Beltway conventional wisdom. Obama is following the blueprint perfectly, eschewing "ideology" (i.e., dirty hippies) for "pragmatism" (i.e, the same shuffling of ruling elites that's been going on for decades). It is, of course, absurd to suggest that Obama is surrounding himself with a Lincolnesque "team of rivals;" every selection so far has come from the same centrist mold. Somehow, even though the actual proposals of Magical Centrists can be reliably guessed, it is not an ideology itself. Glennzilla, in his usual perceptive way, explains.

If one discards the need for ideology in favor of "pragmatism" and "competence" -- as so many people seem so eager to do -- then it's difficult to see how one could form any opinions about questions of this sort beyond a crude risk-benefit analysis (i.e., "pragmatism"). Are there military and economic benefits to be derived for the U.S. from invading Pakistan? Bombing Iran? Lending unquestioning support to Israel? Escalating our occupation of Afghanistan? Remaining indefinitely in Iraq and exploiting their resources? Propping up dictators of all types? Deposing Hugo Chavez? Torturing suspected terrorists for information, or detaining them without process? If so, then those who are heralding "pragmatism" as the supreme value -- or at least something that should trump "ideology" -- would have no real basis to oppose those actions. It is only ideological beliefs that permit opposition to those polices even if they are "beneficial" to our "national self-interest."

This gets to it. The ruling class can't be constrained by "ideology," whether its right or left, because that would place limits on how much it could act out of its own self-interest, which is truly the only ideology it's concerned with. It may seem odd to hear such denigration of anyone with political principles, until you realize that this is the only way the Beltway class can reliably get what it wants.

The search for pragmatism, naturally, is also a bottomless rabbit hole. Magical Centrism always has the pragmatic solution to every problem. There's no reason for Obama to have any lefties on his team, because The Left by definition never has a solution that works. He is only doing us a favor; making government work more efficiently by cutting out the middleman and listening only to the MC's.

Armistice Day

There's probably little hope in reclaiming the original intent of the November 11 memorial from the jingofied, American Legion war party that it and every other patriotic holiday has become. The American ruling class doesn't want anyone to think too long about the first world war, for we may take the wrong lesson about the pitfalls of imperial glory. Plus, we might discover how our freedom'n'liberty loving government enthusiastically jailed anyone speaking against the war on trumped-up sedition charges. So most Americans, to the extent they know anything about that war at all, have a very simplified view of it; as something very different from the war immortalized in Willfred Owen's famous poem.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
pro patria mori.

No more excuses

lenin puts it succinctly, as usual.

But this myth, that America is a uniquely conservative country, has just been heartily dispatched. The alibi won't stand: the Democrats control all three branches of government, with expanded majorities in the Congress and Senate. They have moved deep into Republican territory, including Indiana, which looks like it will fall to Obama by a narrow margin after having been Republican since the 1968 election.... When Obama 'reaches out' to Republicans and starts blustering about bipartisanship, and when he appoints someone like Robert Gates as his secretary of defense, there will be no excuse. If he fails to carry out even his most limited reforms, he has no scope for blaming the Right. If he doesn't close Guantanamo and restore habeus corpus, he has no one else to blame.

All I'm saying is, to those hundreds of thousands of people marching and dancing in the streets, be prepared to be back on the streets soon. The system is designed to lock you out as quickly and quietly as possible.

Indeed. One of the positive outcomes of this election is that we'll no longer have to hear how many bunnies per capita we would have if Saint Gore hadn't been robbed of his rightful place on the throne by Teh Ebbil Ralph Nader and his privileged white male supporters (well, forget it, we'll never be rid of that). Nor should we have to hear how Obama must play rhetorical homage to the Sensible Middle to win elections. The Democrats won a crushing victory because most of the country has recognized the bankruptcy of conservative ideology.

But Obama has already started to fill out his roster with recycled Clintonites. Rahm Emanuel, a congressman from Illinois and former member of the Clinton White House, has been tapped for Obama's chief of staff. A typical hawkish, neoliberal DLCer, Emanuel was loathed by many online activists for favoring centrist candidates over progressives while he was head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Some of this should be expected. After all, the Clinton era is the only other Democratic presidency since 1980, meaning that Obama will have to choose some Clinton veterans if he wants anyone with experience inside the White House. The question, then, is which of three possible options will Obama take?

1. Re-assemble the entire Clinton team person-for-person
2. Balance Clinton veterans either with Republicans and holdovers from the Bush years or
3. With a mix of newer, more progressive voices.

The voters, by taking Obama's promises of "change" seriously, have declared the first two options unacceptable. But this may be the key conflict of Obama's presidency. Will he be able to manage the swelling social movement that so enthusiastically supported him and celebrated in the streets Wednesday morning, believing that he would bring progressive policy changes to the country, into supporting his pro-business and pro-empire presidency? I have only modest doubts.

Good morning, Communist America!

No need to wait for the morning news papes, getcher election news right here!

...

It appears Obama is going to win a major haul of electoral votes while slightly under-performing expectations in the overall popular vote. He's done this by eeking out some razor-thin margins, especially in Indiana and North Carolina, where he's currently leading by a combined 35,000 votes. Neither state has been confirmed final yet; same with Missouri where McCain leads by less than 6,000 votes. Thank whatever celestial authority you like that this was not a close election overall.

...

To repeat, Indiana's gone for Obama. I expect the sun to rise this morning, but if it doesn't I'd understand. The kids did it; under-30s were the only age group Obama won outright here.

...

As expected, no drama in the Eighth. Ellsworth did carry Daviess County; we weren't even his lowest supporters (that'd be Fountain County). I'll have to check decimal places to see if we were the heaviest McCain county. Dropped to 67%, slackers.

....

If there's a grey lining for the Democrats' night, it's that they haven't done as well in Congress as they might have expected. Yesterday I said it would be a major surprise if the D's fall short of 57 Senate seats, but, with three seats still outstanding and a current total of 56, there's a decent chance they may just get one. The Minnesota race between Franken and Coleman has been bitterly fought and may not be over yet. The current tally has Coleman leading by approximately 2,500 votes with precincts reporting stuck at 99%.

This has not been a good two months for the reputation of Alasks in the lower 48, and it's not been improved by their eagerness to defy expectations and common decency to send a convicted felon back to the Senate. There may be some strategic voting at play here; Stevens could win and retire, forcing a special election the Republicans would certainly win, maybe with Bible Spice herself.

The Senate race in Oregon is also a dead heat at this point (538.com scored it a 92% Merkeley likelyhood), but there's still a decent number of precincts yet to report.

...

It also appears the Democrats will fall a bit short of the optimistic pre-election projections. The Times currently scores 18 Dem pickups, a nice gain but less than the 25+ hoped for. I wonder if there was late movement in some GOP districts toward keeping the overall Democratic gains in check. Luckily, Michelle Bachmann will be returning to Washington to snuff out all the traitorous un-Americans among the new representatives.

...

Ballot initiatives were a mixed bag. Most distressingly, it looks like Prop Hate is going to pass in California. This will give the social conservatives a boost coming out of the election. They never liked McCain anyway, and now have some ammunition to claim he lost because of not being conservative enough. Anti-gay measures also passed in Florida, Arkansas and Arizona (didn't we just beat one there two years ago?).

Speaking of reruns from 2006, South Dakota swatted away a slightly-modified version of its abortion ban by an almost-identical margin. Voters also defeated a parental notification clause in California, and wholly scorned an attempt in Colorado to declare personhood for fertilized eggs in the state constitution. I suspect the years are numbered for abortion as a major political football in this country.

Michigan had a good day, voting to legalize medical marijuana as well as stem cell research.

Center-Right Nation

Election returns haven't yet started to come in, but the eminently predictable defining narrative surrounding the election is already starting to play out amongst the establishment. David Sirota calls it "Center-Right Nation," the idea that, regardless of how large the Democratic victory is tonight, they should in no way interpret it as a mandate for liberal government from the American people. Glenzilla, blogging with Sirota at Salon's election day blog, writes;

Obama hasn't even won yet, and already the standard cast of Beltway status-quo-perpetuators are demanding that he scorn his base, stay as far away from "liberals" as possible, and fill his cabinet with old Clinton establishment retreads and even Bush administration appointees. In other words, the only way that Democrats can be successful is if they look as much like Republicans as possible -- the same sorry advice Democrats have been following (and failing with) for decades.

Greenwald and Sirota cite many of the usual suspects, the DLC, New Republic, and MO Sen. Claire McCaskill on Fox News. Also, on last night's Charlie Rose, Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report was making a similar argument; Obama must reach out to those paranoid McCain supporters and reassure them he isn't a black Islamocommie. Everyone gets one vote, but, if you're really really afraid of Obama, apparently your vote counts for more.

I suspect, however, that this meme is being laid down precisely because it will give Obama the cover he needs to do what he wants to do anyway; govern from the right. I watched the quadrennial Frontline special on the candidates' lives on Monday night, and its clear that compromise of this sort has been a defining characteristic in Obama's past. If he were working at an animal shelter and had the choice of giving a dog to someone who wanted to adopt it and someone who wanted to eat it, Obama is the kind of guy who would cut out a few organs for the latter and give the dead carcass to the former. That's a good analogy for the kind of political "compromises" Obama will be asked to accept by the Beltway establishment, and Id guess he's more than amenable to them.

Votin' man

I'm really quite an awful all-around citizen. I abstain from almost all county and city level races on the presumption that one shouldn't vote in races without some knowledge of the candidates (not that having any familiarity with local races here would change my mind about abstaining). But I feel guilty about leaving a great portion of my ballot blank, so I usually vote for Democrats in statewide races, figuring they'd be the ones I'm likely to hate least if I knew anything about them.

Anyway, there's still time to make some predictions, so here goes.

Electoral College: Obama gets 326 EVs, loses IN, FL (I have a hunch the geezers will break for their man, plus, shenanigans), and GA, gets NC.

Popular vote: I think it will be toward the high end of the final polls. 53.1% to 45.2%

Senate: I'll take the over on the Donkeyman's 57; that should be the absolute minimum barring a major upset. Franken wins to make it 58 w/Holy Joe, and I'll take a flier on one of the three Southern seats falling.

House: No idea, 260 sounds about right, but I'll go a little lower than that.

CA hate amendment loses narrowly; the No folks finally got their act together in time to push back the Mormon money.

McCain gets 75 percent in the DC, and we'll be the only county in the Eighth District to go for the Bircherite.

Battle of the techno-babble

My family has decided that we are all going to the Creation Museum as a Christmas vacation.  This surprised me somewhat because, while I knew my siblings were going off into Dobson-land, I wasn't aware of the extent to which they've purchased citizenship.  (The Creation Museum, it should be noted, is backed by a group promoting young-earth creationism, an idea so ludicrous many conservative evangelicals find it incredulous.) The old-school Mennonites used to be pretty unimpressed by big-money celebrity Christianity, but the whole story of how my community and apparently most of my family got sucked into the vacuum of fundamentalist chic will have to wait for another day.  Anyway, I suppose I'm going, because I tend to put off confrontation as long as I possibly can.  I don't talk to my family about politics or religion, so they're not really sure of what kind of strange beast I am, just that I'm an apostate of some sort. 

Kenneth Miller, a Catholic evolutionary biologist who has authored several high school biology textbooks, wondered in his book critical of creationism from a Christian perspective why so many in the church have staked the totality of the Christian faith on whether evolution is real.  He notes that they are practically daring scientists to produce irrefutable proof and, should that happen, they'll shut down the whole Christian project.  That seems like a lot of weight to put on something that doesn't seem theologically critical.  Why can't Gensesis 1 and 2 be taken metaphorically?  The idea that humanity is descended from a common ancestor, and thus one long, extended family, seems perfectly agreeable to me as a socialist.  

In fact, Genesis 1 and evolution are essentially telling us the same thing.  We're all descended from a common source, and we should act with that in mind.  But our fundamentalist friends aren't much interested in the well-being of their human or environmental family these days, which is odd given the implications for their "pro-family" platform by what they claim is literally true.  

The truth is, they aren't much interested in those implications.  These fundamentalists are less concerned about doing right and more concerned about being right.  They don't want people to be convinced by the persuasiveness of their moral philosophy; they want to reassure themselves that what they've believed unquestioningly since they were old enough to walk is the literal and objective truth.  You had better become like them because, even if you think their God is evil and vindictive, He has the power to burn you on a spit forever for rejecting them.  Nyah nyah nyah, etc.  It's power-worship; their god is real, so they have it and you don't. 

According to its Wikipedia article, the Creation Museum makes all employees sign a statement affirming, among other things, 

"no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record."

So Miller's concern that they could ever be convinced to surrender the faith looks impossible.  So why does the museum exist if they admit no contrary evidence could ever sway them?  Remember that fundamentalism is not anti-modern at all; in fact, it wouldn't exist without modernism.  They demand empirical verification of their belief system, otherwise they may as well chuck it aside.  But most of them don't understand the scientific concepts they would need for this.  Heck, most people, regardless of their beliefs, probably don't understand science that well.  If you don't have much of a background in biology or have otherwise studied the topic, I'd be willing to bet you would struggle in an argument with a well-oiled creationist.  

That's why the Creation Museum is here.  It presents a veneer of credibility to fundamentalists who are worried that they are being swamped the great majority of the scientific community and a picture of dueling techno-babble to the general public which doesn't have the tools to pick apart the mounds of pseudoscience horseshit.  Both groups are then left to rely on authority.  The former you'd expect.  The latter is left to trust that the whole of the science world is being straight with them.  Which works well-enough, I suppose, though I'm a believer in people having the knowledge for themselves.  

I still haven't answered the questions of why the fundamentalists choose this particular battle to get so worked up about.  Frankly, I don't know.  Ask one; you can't expect me to explain everything (anything?) can you?  I also don't know what I'm going to do as pennance for supporting this bollocks.  I'm thinking of sending a $25 donation to Planned Parenthood; that should piss them off appropriately.  

Fun election fact

In 2004, Daviess County went for Bush more heavily than any other county in Indiana (there are 92, if you're unaware) with 74.9% of the vote. Whad'ya got kids? Do you think we can break 75 percent for McCain this year and hold onto our title? The Donut Counties surrounding Indianapolis were our major competition in 2004, and, if this report from Salon is any indication, the yuppies may be turning slightly purple. I think we've got it in the bag.

The Graber Theorem

The percentage of all ads used in any political race that are attack ads is inversely proportional to the power and national stature of the office being contested.   (i.e., the proverbial race for town dog-catcher would consist of nearly 100% attack ads.)  

Discuss.  

Some cordial dissent

To paraphrase Tina Fey, I hope to be finished writing about Sarah Palin no later than November 5th. But until then, I'll take this last opportunity to squeeze in a couple of writers questioning the popular liberal consensus about Palin's candidacy.

First, here's Richard Estes at American Leftist.

Palin is a woman of local accomplishment with no national credentials; Biden is a man of national credentials with no accomplishments. It's an old story. But there is more to it than just old fashioned sexism. Palin's social experience is too far removed from the political establishment to be acceptable. No Ivy League education, not even a respected Catholic or state school one, like Berkeley or Michigan. She didn't go to law school, as the vast majority of successful politicians have done. She certainly didn't teach constitutional law at one.

No, Palin is the worst nightmare of the political establishment: someone who was actually personally motivated to enter politics at the local level and through a combination of drive and ruthlessness, became governor of her state. Her politics are therefore heavily influenced, dangerously so from an establishment perspective, by her local, as opposed to elite, experiences. With someone like her, there is always this fear, who knows what she might do? In other words, she might not do what we say. And, even worse, she might even encourage the lower middle class to believe that they actually have power and exhort them to use it. In this respect, comparisons to the career trajectory of Ronald Reagan are apt, and she, like Reagan, will eventually find elite acceptability when it becomes obvious that she is no threat.

While I do think there's a certain amount of truth to this, I think Richard is over-estimating the extent to which Pailn is any kind of threat to established power. The very fact she was selected by the Republican Party to a non-elected position should call this into question. But let's take another look at the veep selection process. Many people, including myself, wondered why the GOP would take such a risk on an unknown politician to appease the social conservative base when Mike Huckabee, who's far more personable, talented, and has unassailable social-con credentials, was available. Huckabee is, however, many of the things Richard ascribes to Palin, as we found out during the primaries. His occasional nods to economic populism, however cursory, sent the party elites into spasms.

Here's Joe Bageant:

Sarah Palin's real coup is that she brings out the snobbery of the left in their dismissal of her as an ignorant hick typical of small town red state America. They vastly underestimate her. Just like they have underestimated George Bush for the past eight years. While they laughed, George Bush managed to get everything he wanted and assist the looting of America in his spare time. No matter that he is vastly unpopular now even among Republicans. He has fulfilled his purpose to the powerful corporations and financial institutions that animate American politics. You do not have to be smart to be president, just malleable to the greater forces at work.

I have to give Republicans credit for actually promoting someone with an almost-honest claim to representing working-class Americans. No more passing off a third-generation scion of a Connecticut political dynasty as a country-fried Texan. If Republicans felt shame, I would hope that would make them feel a little dirty inside. And they hoped the inevitable liberal response of derisive scorn would infuriate and motivate the rural conservative Christians to turn out in 2004 numbers.

It hasn't worked. In fact, many of the tried-and-true Republican distraction tactics have fallen flat in this election. Why? Because this is an economy election; more specifically, an economy election that's effecting more than the working poor. The middle class is always willing to go along with sleazy, reality-show politics when the main issues at stake are bombing brown foreigners and pretending to be a-feared of dark-skinned terrorists and gay marriage. When the dark side of the economy starts trickling up to their level, however, they'll snap to attention faster than you can say "Bear Stearns."

Finally, after expressing a dying ember of sympathy for Sarah Palin, let's stamp it out for good. The popular concession in the mainstream press that Palin is a talented politician with a national future--despite the disaster she has been in this campaign--is unnecessarily kind. Palin has shown little ability, or even intent, to appeal to anyone beyond the niche she was harvested to placate. Indeed, she's apparently trying to alienate as many non-wingnuts as possible with a steady stream of snark and sarcasm. Take away her telemprompter, and she turns from a "pitbull with lipstick" to a nervous sheepdog. If Obama looks unstoppable in 2012, she may be selected to run on the hope that she will continue to satsify the social cons while the party holds out for more favorable waters. Otherwise, there is still Bobby Jindal and, possibly, Petraeus; much more likely options for the Republican Party, provided it stays roughly in its current configuration. Which is another post..for another day.

Make 'em sweat

The Economist, the newsmagazine of record for the Anglo-American ruling class, has issued a "wholehearted" endorsement of Barack Obama for president, with the natural caveat that he not succumb to apostate tendencies.

Our main doubts about Mr. Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr. Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party's baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr. Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr. Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.

Referring to a post I made yesterday, this is why a sane, level-headed Republican Party is an absolute necessity. With the GOP marginalized and Obama in their back pocket, the Economist editors and the rest of the monied elite knows that any serious opposition to neoliberalism can be contained. Thus the unusual level of enthusiasm for Obama by a magazine which has always struggled to find an American party to consistently support (the Libertarians being inefficient for anything beyond providing the magazine's American subscriber base). There is, of course, the ever-present risk that uppity hippies will seize control of the Democratic Party, but the purchasing power of free-market democracy can probably be trusted to prevent that unwelcome development.

This is a good time to point out that one of the genuinely positive outcomes of a Democratic government would be passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which Obama has promised to sign. It may need significant majorities in both houses to pass, but it's a good first step.

America's most wanted

When Brian Moore won the Socialist Party USA's nomination for president last October, I doubt he saw himself working the national media circuit one week before the election. But, with the persistent accusations of the 's' word coming from the McCain/Palin campaign, the press seems curious to learn about about the actual socialist candidate. Moore has been interviewed by Fox News' Neil Cavuto, the New Republic, and by Stephen Colbert on last night's Colbert Report.



Well, he's no Norman Thomas. I'll be interested to see if the increased exposure helps the SPUSA increase its 2004 vote total of 10,837 (itself nearly double the party's total vote from the 2000 election.).

Chilean humour

Michele Bachelet, president of Chile, is among the Latin American leaders finding some levity in the current financial crisis.

“Why has there never been a coup in the United States?” she asked a group of investors.

“Because there is no U.S. embassy in the United States.”

That's Chavez-tastic, Madame President, well played. Gosh, the colonials are sure feeling rebellious these days.

He can't get no satisfaction

Jeff Passan fires up the Complain-o-Matic 5000 for his latest column at Yahoo! Sports. I can only assume Passan had mechanical help on this one, because no human with a functioning cerebral cortex could've written this paragraph.

It’s awful, embarrassing even, that the country became so indifferent to what once was the most popular championship series in sports. Even worse, Major League Baseball, fat and happy with its coffers growing and ticket sales booming, watched idly as the number of people viewing its championship series dwindled to a record low in Game 3

"It's so crowded, no one goes there anymore." Thanks, Yogi.

Passan does get around to a couple of worthwhile arguments in there. Baseball does need to consider the climate effects of pushing the season so late into October, either by trimming needless off days from the playoffs or starting the season earlier, trading some bad weather days in late March for a cleaner forecast at your marquee event.

But most of it is sheer dribble. Passan wants to gripe about Selig changing the rules on the fly to prevent a situation where the World Series was awarded to the Phillies even after Tampa Bay had scored to tie the game in the top of the sixth, but can't find anyone who'll say it wasn't the right move. He also drags out the annual hobbyhorse of sportsriters; World Series games start too late and the childrens can't watch them, therefore baseball will be extinct by the next generation. World Series games have started at 8:30 Eastern since at least the early '90s, and we're still here, perhaps because the East Coast isn't the only part of the country. The reality is that games are not going to start before 8 PM Eastern as long as baseball wants to remain on network television, and, if they don't, Passan and the like will complain baseball didn't make the compromises necessary to stay on free TV.

Passan then closes on his most reprehensible note, claiming the Rays don't deserve to win the Series because they have a small fan base. Passan seems amazed that a team which has never won more than 70 games has very few fans and declares this unsatisfactory, hoping, apparently, that condemning the Rays to more losing will magically increase their support . (This would be more ironic if Passan were one of those sportswriters who regularly complains about the lack of parity in baseball.) I am again amazed that this is all the logic it takes to become a national sportswriter, and wonder how on earth I haven't yet managed to ascend those heights.

"There is not a Red America or a Blue America, there is a scared shitless America"

Oliver actually makes an important point here (and if you're not listening to Oliver and Zaltzman on The Bugle podcast every week, you must go and subscribe now). Democrats may have lamented the politics of fear for the past six years, but they've never been afraid to use appeals to fear for their own ends. Corporate-centrist Dems point to the increasingly unhinged extremism of the GOP as the reason why left-of-center voters must support them at all costs. The Democrats may be weak, but etting the current Republicans back in power would present catastrophic risks.

This is why, if you want better Democrats, you'll have to get better Republicans first. The Democrats are the reactionary party in American poiltics; they'll only ever go as far left as they need to go to distinguish themselves from the GOP. So, while it may be gratifying to see moderate Republicans and paleoconservatives lining up behind Obama, we ultimately are going to need those people back in charge of their old party to drum out the wingnuts. They should be compelled to return because, as a strictly practical matter, we are still a two-party system, and the public will return to the Republican Party when they are dissastisfied with donkey rule. If the nuts are still leading the party, this won't benefit anyone.

From a progressive point of view, we need sane Republicans who, while we may have important political disagreements, won't actually endanger the future of the planet if they come to power. If the GOP becomes the party of people like Andrew Bacevich, they may even represent a persuasive alternative. Then, if the Democrats want to keep progressives under the tent, they'll have to make a real pitch on policy grounds instead of the familiar lesser-evilism of the past few elections.

Big 'Mo

I was going to remark on this post after Game 5 of the ALCS, but now may actually be a more pertinent time for it. The key weakness of a purely saberist approach to baseball is mistaking unmeasurable psychological factors for non-existent factors. Yes, it is fairly useless to listen to sportswriters maw about things like chemistry and momentum, because they're naturally going to cherry-pick whatever suits their purpose. But let's take the example of the Red Sox having "momentum" after the big comeback in Game 5. What are the Red Sox chances of winning any two isolated games in St. Petersburg? Now, how much does their "momentum" increase those chances? No one can say, of course, but just because it is still less than 100 percent doens't mean it hasn't increased at all.

I say this is more relevant now because it's apparent that the Rays haven't been the same team since The Meltdown, with only Matt Garza's Game 7 pitching performance standing out as a reminder of the team that won six of its first eight postseason games. The offense has gone bust, and the bullpen has never recovored. If not for the Phillies incredible futility with runners on base in the first three games of the World Series, they would be looking at a lopsided four-game sweep.

Oppressing the rich

Something struck me while I was watching the full conversation between Obama and "Joe the Plumber, who, despite not having the money to buy this business he claims or even being a licensed plumber, has become the official McCain campaign mascot for the last week or two.



Here's Joe, explaining his position succinctly. (via)

On Good Morning America Thursday, Mr. Wurzelbacher admitted that he does not make $250,000.

“No, not even close,” he said.

But when asked why he does not support increased taxes for the wealthy, he stood by his critique of Mr. Obama.

“Why should they be penalized for being successful?” he asked. “That's a very socialist view.”

Perhaps I'm missing something fundamental, but I've always felt the reward for becoming more wealthy was...becoming more wealthy. This longstanding conservative/trickle-down saw which claims taxing the rich more heavily discourages entrepreneurship seems to imagine that people are not only obscenely selfish but also downright spiteful. How many people would give up on inventing a new widget or starting a business because, even though it would improve their lot dramatically, they would somehow still feel as though they aren't making as much as they should. Apparently everyone has a inherent calculation of the value of labor embedded into their head, and it's conveniently stuck on "Reagonomics." So Joe's just going to pass up the chance to make more money because those calculations don't work out. Okay then.

World Serious

A lot of observers have been comparing this Series to the 1991 matchup between Minnesota and Atlanta, who were both, like Tampa Bay this season, last-place teams the year before. Like the Braves of the early '90's, the Rays have erased a decade of futility with a nucleus of great young pitchers, and, like the Twins, they play in a quirky domed stadium that gives them a pointed home field advantage. If that's any indication, we should be in for a hell of a series.

For that to happen, though, the Phillies will have to rise to the occasion. The Rays are a superior team, winning 97 games in the best division in baseball, and Philadelphia must overcome the pratfall of a long layoff like the one that has felled the past two World Series losers. They'll need several things to go right to make this a long series.

• Philadelphia's starting pitching will be at a disadvantage in every game Cole Hamels doesn't start, therefore it's almost a necessity for Hamels to win both of his starts for the Phillies to have any chance in this series. This will be especially apparent on the back end of the Phillies rotation, where the ageless Jamie Moyer has been hammered in both outings so far, and what the Rays lack in a top-end ace, they make up for with terrifying depth.
• The middle three games are always crucial for the home team, but especially so for Philadelphia, which can't count on getting much out of its visit to the Trop. Additionally, the first two of those games will be started by the aforementioned soft end of the Phillies rotation. Luckily for them, thanks to MLB's ridiculous postseason schedule dragging the Series into late October, the city of Philadelphia may be uninhabitable by the time the series hits town. If Citizens Bank Park is an icy bog this weekend, the Phillies should have a significant advantage over the inexperienced team from a domed stadium.
• The Rays bullpen--which had been the team's most improved element over 2007--seemed to revert to its old form in the last three games of the ALCS. In Game 7, manager Joe Maddon went to Dan Wheeler--who had taken over as the closer when Troy Percival went down late in the season--to start the eighth inning, a spot normally reserved for Grant Balfour, who was roughed up in the Game 5 meltdown. He then turned to David Price, a projected ace with exactly 14 big-league innings under his belt, to get the final four outs. The Phillies should be decidedly more comfortable on the back end of games with Brad Lidge, perfect on the season in save chances.
• Say it with me now; it's a short series, and crazy things happen.

The Phillies do have more quality than recent National League champions, so I can see them extending this series to a second visit to Florida. However, they just can't match Tampa Bay's incredible depth, which is the best antidote against the Rays' hot hitters regressing to the mean somewhat. Double A's--gotta get that in one more time--in six.

Shuffling the deck chairs of inequality

I've been thinking a lot about this essay by Walter Benn Michaels that Richard Estes linked a couple of weeks ago (and Estes' post is worth a full look). Michaels writes:

The us [sic] today is certainly a less discriminatory society than it was before the Civil Rights movement and the rise of feminism; but it is not a more just, open and equal society. On the contrary: it is no more just, it is less open and it is much less equal.

Why? Because it is exploitation, not discrimination, that is the primary producer of inequality today. It is neoliberalism, not racism or sexism (or homophobia or ageism) that creates the inequalities that matter most in American society; racism and sexism are just sorting devices. In fact, one of the great discoveries of neoliberalism is that they are not very efficient sorting devices, economically speaking. If, for example, you are looking to promote someone as Head of Sales in your company and you are choosing between a straight white male and a black lesbian, and the latter is in fact a better salesperson than the former, racism, sexism and homophobia may tell you to choose the straight white male but capitalism tells you to go with the black lesbian. Which is to say that, even though some capitalists may be racist, sexist and homophobic, capitalism itself is not

This is also why the real (albeit very partial) victories over racism and sexism represented by the Clinton and Obama campaigns are not victories over neoliberalism but victories for neoliberalism: victories for a commitment to justice that has no argument with inequality as long as its beneficiaries are as racially and sexually diverse as its victims.

I imagine this is going to drive American liberals stark raving mad if they ever get wind of it, and Michaels ought to be prepared to learn all the ways in which he hates women and minorities. Modern liberals see themselves as the only acceptable vanguard of these social struggles, even though their ancestors were mostly tagging after folks of a more radical ilk got the ball rolling. If your prescription for fighting inequality doesn't end ultimately in voting a straight-ticket Democratic ballot, there's obviously some prejudiced skeleton in your closet you must be hiding, and the liberals are going to find out what it is.

But this is a worthwhile point. Much argument goes in in identity-liberal circles over the status of "allies" who are white, straight, or male (pick any or all), among them perfidous lefties--probably spoiled WASP's, the buggers--who don't toe the liberal/Democratic line. However, as long as you're backing non-discrimination-under-neoliberalism as Michaels describes, it's a mistake to believe we have any truck with you that's more than temprorary and limited in scope.

On a similar point, If There is Hope... writes about the fate of the Liberal Party in Canada in the middle of a (great) post on last week's elections. DJN here is talking about the attempt to push a consolidated left-of-center "Anybody But Coservative" vote.

The Liberals have reversed the now famous “culture war” strategy for the American Republicans. They have maintained a progressive position on social issues – women’s rights, immigrant rights – but have been hardcore neoliberals in the process. This has, as Thomas Frank famously said of working-class Americans, led to millions of Canadians voting against their economic interests by voting Liberal. The Liberals maintain this and the ABCers fell for it once again who ignore the fact that the Liberal attacks on social spending disproportionately affects women, immigrants, the poor, etc, or that the Liberals propped up the Tories the ABCers oppose so much for nearly three years. The ABCers collapse into the worst kind of lesser-evilism, content that the Liberals don’t attack abortion rights while their cuts to social spending leave millions of women without family doctors, without the healthcare they need for themselves and children, without wage parity with men, without adequate and affordable housing, and so on. Why is this considered "a choice" when there is the NDP?

Sadly, the same kind of desperate compromise (i.e. succumbing to pasty centrism) that has watered down the American left has seeped its way into Canada as well. Of course, he could just as easily be talking about the Democrats (who are not even that socially progressive, really), but, of course, there is no alternative here, a fact the Democrats get a lot of mileage from. But more on that a bit later.

Oh, Bill Kristol, is there nothing you cannot get terribly, terribly wrong?

Jane Mayer's story on the rise of Sarah Palin in this week's New Yorker is an excellent read.  She notes that, while Palin may have been a total unknown to many political junkies, the right-wing bigwigs certainly knew who she was and had been pushing McCain to pick this real-live Freeper for months.  Chief among them was America's favorite unintentional comedian, Billy Kristol. 

The other journalists who met Palin offered similarly effusive praise: Michael Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?

They could put Kristol's face next to "fail" in the dictionary, but that's somehow selling him short.  

Take me to your leader

The really fun thing I learned from Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann's appearance on "Hardball" wasn't her endorsement of neo-McCarthyist show trials--that's boilerplate winger rhetoric by now--but that her opponent in the upcoming congressional election is named Elwyn Tinklenberg. I had no idea Elves were eligible for public office.  I'm not sure if we ought to support this or not.  Given the rate of re-electing incumbents, he could be in Washington for a looooong time.  

I can't watch

Jesus Hussein Christ, can't anybody put a stake in these bastards?

Honestly, if the Saawwwwwwx! win the Series again, no amount of good news from the election may be able to make up for it.

Understanding the Big Shitpile

If you're like me, and you probably aren't, you're probably still dumbfounded by all the alphabet soup financial arcana that's feeding the ongoing credit collapse. Luckily there are some beginnner's resources out there to help us out. Firstly, these two episodes of This American Life--#355 and #365--are an invaluable resource, although I may have to listen to both of them again before I can truly regale dinner parties with an explanation of credit default swap as the TAL blog advises.

...

Alternet has re-published an article by Arun Gupta from the NYC Indypendent, complete with colorful illustrations.

...

Richard D. Wolff, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, makes a pitch for a socialist alternative in the broader context of the past 40 years of American economic life.

Canadian elections

Canada held a snap general election on Tuesday, with Stephen "Bush North" Harper and his Tories hoping to grab a majority government. While the Cons did pick up seats, the economic crunch which developed after the election was called appears to have damaged their hopes of a majority.

With almost all votes in, the Conservatives were said to have won 143 seats, a big rise but still short of the 155 needed for a majority.

The opposition Liberal Party, under Stephane Dion, has won 76 seats, a loss of nearly 20 seats.

Turnout was put at 59.1% - one of the lowest figures on record.

Also benefiting from the Liberals' misfortune was the NDP, which gained eight seats for a total of 37, getting 18.2 percent of the total vote.

A nut!

In addition to the points raised here and here, another seemingly obvious objection to the rightie hysterics over ACORN turning in faulty voter registrations needs to be made, or rather, reiterated.  Even if a non-negligible number of Amanda Hugginkisses and Hugh Jasses actually turn out to vote on election day--itself a dubious assumption--that alone won't significantly delegitimize Obama's win for the simple reason that these fake registrants can't be polled and Obama holds a large and ever-expanding lead in all the indicative polls.  If this were the 2000 election, there may be a faint glimmer of concern here.  

You might think these problems could be averted with a public push to make registering easier and take it out of the hands of third-party actors.  This, however, is not the solution righties are looking for, because their problem isn't really "voter fraud," it's poor people believing they have a stake in democracy. 

That is not a small number

When the Gregorian calender was introduced in 1582, authorities had to eliminate ten days, including October 13, to properly synchronize it with the seasons. Alas, October 13 did exist in 1981, and humanity is the poorer for it.

Yes, today is my birthday, and though I've provided you with the simple math involved, I'd prefer not to think about how long I've been around.

And now, a song!

Back in the saddle!

Right-winger Patrick Ruffini sez (via)

President Barack Obama with 60 votes in the Senate means a socialist America.

Now don't get excited, my friends. I've noticed wingnuts reaching for the red-bait more frequently in recent days as the inevitability of an Obama victory starts to come down for them. Apparently the "liberal" menace isn't good enough to scare Americans anymore; these troubled times require a more reliable epithet. In with the new enemy, same as the very old. Of course, Ruffini takes this very seriously, as do many righties who see public libraries as a sign of the creeping socialist menace.

And really, he's not wrong. I'm a big-tent sort of socialist; I don't see why the term shouldn't be used more broadly to encompass the wide spectrum of left-wing politics that have been influenced by socialist ideas. Very Serious people may not agree, because they're afraid people of Ruffini's ilk have successfully convinced the public--if not themselves--that "socialism" is somehow fundamentally anti-American. Or perhaps they're merely hoping to stay on the Decent Dole.

Not to be misleading, I don't believe Obama plus a Democratic congress equals a socialist America, or even a social democratic or New Deal America. At best, it'll be Clintonite neoliberal America with modestly reformist tendencies. But if he were, I'd hope for a more robust defense from the liberals--or whatever they're calling themselves after conceding every other term to the rightists--than a muddled chorus of "of course he is no socialist! Socialists R Bad!"

We are all Rays now

My friends, if we do not hang together we will surely hang separately.

"The world's unfair, and they are becoming mentally imbalanced"

Things aren't going to well at Fox News these days, as The Daily Show aptly demonstrates.



I especially love the opening clip, which may be the all-fired dumbest thing ever uttered on American television. The anchor using an accusatory tone suggests it may not be a coincidence that Obama is taking the lead in battleground states where righties are accusing Democrats of voter fraud. The problem is worse than we thought; apparently these voter registration groups are even pollsters to call people who don't exist, and include them in the results! "Is this the I.P. Freeley residence? If the election were held tomorrow..."

I think there may be a maximum competence test to get on the air at Fox.

This won't help me a lick

Google Mail is rolling out a new feature called "Mail Goggles," which, as you may guess from the name, is designed to prevent you from sending rash messages while under the influence. When sending an email late at night on the weekend, the program will ask you a series of simple math problems before it allows you to send a message.

This, however, is not going to be any kind of impediment to me. I'm fully capable of talking myself into sending unwise emails late at night while perfectly sober. Until it carries a speech program that can crush my hopes and dreams, I'm afraid I won't find a use for it.

Into the time machine!

I can't believe the McCain campaign and right-wing pundits ever thought they could make anything out of Obama's alleged connection to Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers. Obama was approximately eight years old when the Weathermen were at their peak of blowing up statues (and themselves), and Ayers' doings in the years since Obama has been active in politics are the sort of thing most people would find unremarkable, if not laudatory. Hell, Ayers is a professor at the University of Chicago; I suppose all of those libertarian economists are similarly tainted by association.

I would expect them to be more likely to exhume the sermons of Jeremiah Wright again to frighten the public, but, unlike Ayers, the Wright tapes have already been aired extensively and turned out to be a total flop at turning public opinion against Obama. This is a case where the over-religiofied nature of Americans has a beneficial side. Only right-wing fundies--who aren't voting for Obama anyway--think you're required to take every word your religious leader speaks as an ineffable proclamation. Most people recognize that being part of a faith community naturally requires some realpolitik.

But Ayers has one important advantage over Wright; he allows the old-timers to drag us kicking and screaming back to the OMG teh Sixties!, which they still believe has inexhaustable relevance to any and all future conflicts. Alas, we will never be rid of them.

...I speak in the past tense because almost as soon as McCain and Palin started the Ayers-palooza, they've apparently now called it off.

Rewind

For all the talk about the supposed uniqueness of this year's election, I've been having the feeling that it all seems so familiar somehow. Perhaps it's because both candidates are emulating Bush's 2000 strategy of pitching themselves as outsiders and reformers, and that being the first presidential election I really followed in detail, it's stuck with me as a baseline. Palin even used the phrase "reformer with results" the other day, a verbatim quote of one of Bush's campaign slogans.

Of course, I suspect this is not all that unusual. Every challenger tries to portray themselves as a reformer of the incumbent's obvious maladies. This year is only different in that both tickets are trying to claim that mantle for themselves. But the pundits solemnly intoning this year's election is about "change" are laughable; every election in this country is a change election. The proles get tired of seeing the same faces on the teevee screen, so the political ruling class must periodically replace them with newer and younger models.

I'm also amused by the oft-ridiculed tendency of McCain and Palin to award themselves the label of "maverick." Remember all the way back in 2004, when Bush reminded us how "you may not agree with me, but at least you know where I stand?" Four years later, most of the same people who backed Bush are supporting two people who openly admit no one can predict what they may do next. It makes you wonder if anyone in this country ever looks at a history book....

October baseball

The baseball postseason is underway, and hopefully we're going to be treated to more than the dismal level of intrigue of the past couple of years. The 2006 NLCS was the last entertaining series, and the World Series hasn't gone beyond five games since 2003.

The National League pennant fight is already set, with the Dodgers sweeping the Cubs and the Phillies dropping Milwaukee from their first playoff appearance since 1982. The Brewers could've used Harvey's Wallbangers in that series. I overlook the anti-climax of a sweep when the Cubs are on the short end of the stick, since nothing satisfies the soul like a warm bath in the flowing river of Cubs fans' tears.

I'm going to stand by something I said several years ago; I don't think the nationwide pity club known as Cubs fandom feeds off a strictly masochistic fascination with losing. If that were so, they should all be flowing to the Royals or Pirates, at least. Sports fandom is quasi-religious at heart, and it has an obsession with self-flagellating asceticism, with the highest form of heresy reserved for those who are deemed "bandwagon" fans. Cubs fans, being a mix of knucklehead frat-boys, lazy jocks and half-awake know-nothings, are hoping to slide through playing it both ways. They are not actually courageous enough to root for an actually abysmal franchise but still image-conscious--and indeed, this is the only reason they became Cubs fans in the first place, to join a trend--to realize that rooting for the Yankees is seriously unhip. Thus their affinity for the Cubs, a rich, large-market franchise that nonetheless seems guaranteed to fail in the end.

We should put aside any notion that finally winnning the damn World Series will make self-righteous Cubs fans any more tolerable. Red Sox fans have similar genetic material, and winning the series has only made them more whiny and entitled. It's likely, given the much larger spread of the disease, that winning a title would make Cubs fans exponentially more insufferable. While I think it's still likely to happen in the next decade, that's one pre-emptive war I can get behind.

In the American League, the Tampa Bay Rays continue to be the story of the season. The team won more than 70 games for the first time in franchise history after shortening their nickname from "Devil Rays" in the offseason. Ladies and gentlemen, your 2009 Cincinnati Eds. The Rays lead two games to one over the Chicago White Sox, home to the most obnoxiously awful broadcaster in baseball; Ken "The Hawk" Harrelson, who single-handendly makes the team as hateable as their metropolitan neighbors. The other AL series is a battle of perennial playoff teams, with Evil Empire North leading 2-1 over the Pacific Rim Angels of Mexifornia.

Burn, baby, burn

I've abandoned my child! I've abandoned my boy!

...

Now, you probably haven't missed me, given that the only story in the past week is the apparent pending collapse of the American financial industry which, as I've established before, I know virtually nothing about--in other words, about as much as John McCain knows. All I can tell is that there's a Big Shitpile, and if we don't pay Wall Street bankers $700 billion immediately to take the shitpile off their hands, it'll be Great Depression 2.0: The Depressioning.

This bailout package is either necessary to keep the shitpile from totally collapsing the economy, or the most blatant extortion racket in American history, or possibly both. I can't begin to tell you whether it's necessary or not, but I don't have the first bit of confidence in our business-owned government to make sure this is a real emergency and not just a handout to billionaires. I'm not the only one who sees the resemblance between between this situation and the Iraq war resolution in 2002; a burgeoning crisis that must be answered !right now! without any time for the public to digest the consequences. And Paulson's original proposal--give us the money now, no questions, no strings attatched--doesn't strike me as coming from a man who is serious about making a good-faith compromise to thwart impending doom.

If Paulson and his Wall Street comrades--We Are All Socialists Now, apparently--really want that money, now seems like a good time to give it to them nailed down with a full spread of progressive demands. As the original proposal showed, however, they have no interest in anything except a deferrential offer because they're more than willing to hold the contry hostage until we give in to their demands. After an overwhelming pubilc outpouring, the House rejected a version of the bailout bill on Monday, with representatives facing the biggest electoral challenges in November playing the deciding factor. You may think this looks like a rare victory for democracy, but you'd be wrong. The Dow plunged 777 points after the bill failed, as the public's financial masters reminded them who's making the rules here.

I expect this will scare the pubilc enough to provide the political cover needed to pass the bailout. And practically that may be the best thing. In a better world, we might have a democratic government that did more than the bidding of big business, but that ship has long since sailed. The bankers are, as always, in the stronger position, because they will walk away with the most toys regardless of what happens. When Jesus said "the poor will always be with you," he hadn't considered the antithesis in modern gangster capitalism.

Root for a tie

The Electoral College needs to go, but it seems no outcome can sufficiently prove its absurdity to the two major parties. Genghis Bush won the 2000 election despite losing the popular vote, and nearly had the tables turned on in 2004, but neither prompted any movement toward revamping the antiquated system. There may be, however, one outcome disastrous enough to spur a movement for dumping the college.

A tie.

According to the last update from the boys of fivethirtyeight.com, a 269-269 electoral vote tie occurred in 3.2 percent of their simulations. The most likely road to a tie has Obama winning al the Kerry states save New Hampshire and adding Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico. It's a longshot, as McCain needs to come back in New Hampshire, and Obama must defend the key Kerry states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, but, this far from the election, it can't be ruled out.

Would it be a nightmare? It could be, especially if--as Silver predicts--McCain wins the popular vote. The House of Representatives would have to break a tie, and it's technically controlled by Democrats, though they could've fooled me. This could be the partisan inverse of Florida 2000 magnified a hundred fold, and I don't think the righties will take too kindly to having Katherine Harris come back and haunt them.

It's finished!

After nearly five years, slacktivist has finished his epic deconstruction of the eponymous first novel in the "Left Behind" series.

I think this ties it up nicely:

Any one of those faults, on its own, would have been enough to earn Left Behind a place on the Worst Books of 1995 list. The presence of all of those faults -- in a single book and in such concentrated form -- is more than enough to secure its place on a list of the Worst Books of All Time.

Yet the book's signature failure is something far simpler. Left Behind disproves the very thing it sets out to prove. It presents an inadvertent but irrefutable case for the unreality and impossibility of all of the events that Tim LaHaye claims are prophesied to occur at any moment.

Those events are not about to occur. They never will occur. They never can occur. Don't believe me? Go read Left Behind and see for yourself.

That signature failure, Left Behind's forceful refutation of itself, is what earns this book my vote as the Worst Book of All Time.

Indeed. Ultimately, the major flaw of "Left Behind" is that it's actually antagonistic to the whole of the Rapture-ready/"end is near" theology. The latter relies on uncertainty; it needs vague ominous warnings to appeal to people. This way, any major upheaval in global politics, weather, geologic activity and so forth can be invoked as a sign of the Last Days, without any need to assign it to a broader outlook. "Left Behind" betrays this by laying out such a world in detail, and it's a world that anyone with a modest understanding of geopolitics would recognize as having no resemblance to our own, and anyone with a thorough understanding of the globe would recognize that the world of "Left Behind" could never come to pass.

Any admirer of Tim LeHaye cannot believe LeHaye's insistence that the Rapture is near at hand. LeHaye himself has seen to it.

Does John McCain know where Spain is?

Of course not; he can't see it from any of his houses. 

You may have forgotten about John McCain, who's still technically running for president as the titular head of the Republican ticket.  He may want you to forget for a few days more, after a baffling interview he gave to a Spanish radio presenter in which he seems to conflate Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero with other Latin American left-wing leaders, and says he won't meet with Zapatero even after the interviewer reminds McCain that he's the prime minister of Spain.  

 McCain's campaign is apparently claiming he fully intended to snub Zapatero, whose social democrats came to power when the Spanish public ejected the previous right-wing government for its support of the Iraq war.  Perhaps they're right, and Spain is becoming the new France in American wingnut circles.  More likely McCain just can't keep track of all the things he's supposed to say anymore.  The interview also aired on a Miami radio station, and McCain was probably told to spare no quarter in denouncing the Latin left.  Then he drew a blank when he tried to remember if Zapatero was included, and decided to take the safe way out rather than risk angering the right-wing refugees in South Florida. 

Palinland

News the past few days has been falling faster than the Milwaukee Brewers' playoff hopes. Not exactly Ratheresque, but when you're too busy keeping up its hard to think up avuncular zingers.

...

The Times and Post both had extensive articles Sunday documenting Sarah Palin's political career in Alaska, and neither is very flattering. Palin comes off with an almost Nixonian dedication to a personalized political agenda, firing or intimidating anyone who crosses her and hiring under-qualified friends to top government positions.

Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.

“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

Using your high school yearbook as an application folder? Man, I gotta get the Donkeyman elected to public office.

The Times article also covers Palin's alleged inquiry into banning books at the Wasilla public library shortly after her election as mayor, an incident that preceded the mysterious sacking of the librarian (that seems to be a recurring theme with Palin; future employees of the Vice-President are encouraged to keep their resumes updated--or their high school yearbook nearby). The top target of Palin's book-banning effort was "Pastor, I Am Gay," by the Rev. Howard Bess, a feisty, independent Baptist minister who has been a frequent agitator in the ultra-conservative Wasilla region.

Palin has attended several churches over the years, but all of them have been affiliated with the pentecostal Assemblies of God, the same denomination portrayed in the film "Jesus Camp" which many evangelicals dismissed as non-representative fringe movement. She certainly has the vocabulary of a fundamentalist, twice telling an Alaska blogger she believes the Rapture will occur in her lifetime. And, despite the sudden discovery of identity politics by Republicans, Palin is far from a friend of women's rights. As mayor of Wasilla, Palin backed a law forcing rape victims to pay for their own rape kits.

Sarah Palin may well represent the final melding of reality television with national elections, as the American public is poised to put a small-town petty hack in the White House on the illusion that she's a real-life Disney character, and that'll make for great TV. Many observers have correctly warned that Barack Obama is a substance-free celebrity candidate, but the Repubilcans have again played a trump card, taking lowerst-common-denominator, pop-culture politics to its logical conclusion. However, the fleeting nature of American celebrity may come back to haunt the McCain campaign; the torrent of negative revelations is taking its toll on the popular perception of Palin, and her "aw shucks I'm jes' folks" act may not survive until Election Day.