cascadian telegrams

a scientist's take on the election

A scientist creates a FAQ for the 2008 US Elections.  A must-read!

reagan was a fool

with the current financial collapse... do we really need any more evidence that Ronald Reagan was entirely clueless?  And do we really want more simpletons in charge?

He was a bumbler with a bum philosophy.  Even to my then-teenage ears, I could see through his aphorisms and 'aw shucks' phoniness (full disclosure:  I voted for John Anderson in my first election in 1980 because he told the truth about the need for a gasoline tax.  I guess that makes me the Naderite of the 1980 election).

Arianna Huffington nails it today on HuffPost:

Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural address, famously declared that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Twenty-seven years later, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and seven-plus years into the reign of Bush and Cheney, Reagan's anti-government battle cry should be on trial. But, stunningly, it is not.

This needs to change. The presidential candidates' view of the role of government should be one of the central questions of the last 36 days of the campaign. And it should definitely be a question they are asked at their next debate:

"Sen. McCain, given the part deregulation played in the current economic crisis and your support of a massive government bailout of the financial industry, are you now ready to break with Ronald Reagan's assessment?"

And, to be even handed: "Sen. Obama, in 1996, Bill Clinton cheerfully announced that 'the era of big government is over.' As the Dow plummets and Wall Street and Main Street turn to Washington for big government bailouts, are you now ready to break with President Clinton's assessment?"

The shift in my own thinking on the role of government was what led to my disillusionment with the Republican Party, and the transformation in my political views. I've always been progressive on social issues: pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-gay rights -- even when I was a Republican. The big difference is that I once believed the private sector would address America's social problems. But the hope that people would roll up their sleeves and solve this country's social ills without the help of government was never fully realized. There were never enough volunteers or donations -- and the problems were just too massive and intractable to tackle without the raw power of appropriations that only government can provide.

Our economy is not the only thing that is crumbling. So is the philosophical foundation of the modern Republican Party -- also known as the Leave Us Alone Coalition, led by its spiritual guru, Grover Norquist. His dream of making government so small "we can drown it in a bathtub" has been embraced by the GOP mainstream.

Indeed, during his 2003 inauguration, Jeb Bush stood in front of Florida's capitol building and said: "there would be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers; silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill."

I sadly suspect that Jeb and Grover and their Republican compatriots have not yet updated their views of government -- they have not yet made the connection between demonizing government and looking to it to save the day.

The financial meltdown has put the Grand Old Party's schizophrenia on full display. But why are so many in the media, the Democratic Party, and the Obama campaign averting their eyes from the spectacle of a party that wants to drown government until they need it to bail out Wall Street or AIG -- that wants to vanquish government workers, unless they are listening in on our phone conversations or working hard rolling back government regulations?

It's like the story, probably apocryphal, of the agitated -- and obviously confused -- senior citizen imploring a GOP politician not to "let the government get its hands on Medicare."

With the madness of this contradictory mindset exposed, voters will have a chance to decide if they agree with Norquist and Jeb and W and Cheney and the Republican Messiah himself, Ronald Reagan and, yes, with John McCain. And even Cindy McCain who, in her otherwise bland convention speech, called for "the Federal government" to "get itself under control and out of our way."

A staggering 83 percent of Americans believe that we are heading in the wrong direction. And, I'm sorry, Sen. McCain, I don't think it's because of too many earmarks or because $3 million was spent in 2003 to study bear DNA in Montana.

Size matters in some things, but when it comes to government, it's not the size of the government, it's the way it is utilized.

"Big government" didn't get us into Iraq. It didn't spy on Americans or open black op rendition facilities all over the world. "Big government" didn't create Guantanamo or okay the use of torture. "Big government" didn't leave the residents of New Orleans to suffer in the wake of Katrina. "Big government" didn't cause the financial industry to run off the rails. Indeed, the free market is what created all the new, risky ways for banks to game the system and, eventually, implode -- then come calling on "big government" to ride to the rescue.

So let's hear what McCain and Obama think the fundamental role of government should be. I can think of no better way to underline the massive gulf between the two candidates -- and the two parties they represent -- at the very moment when McCain is so desperately trying to blur the differences (see his recent shopping spree at the second-hand populism store: "Big discounts on 'fat cats' and 'Wall Street greed'!")

Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig says that if Americans recognize that the financial crisis -- and the need for a government bailout -- is due to "policies McCain still promotes... this could well be the event that effected a generational shift in governmental attitudes. Think Hoover vs. (the eventual) FDR."

But if we want to make sure that Americans make that connection, we need to put the question of the role of government front and center in the campaign. Economic policy and foreign policy and domestic policy are all important areas of debate. But before we continue looking at the (falling) trees, let's take a step back and consider the forest.

• Wall Street Crisis

rep. marcy kapture - rocks

wow... Tell It, Sister!

 

I've been listening to crap and obfuscation from conservatives for so long that it makes me want to cry when I hear someone cut through the shit. 

eyes on the prize..

A good post from 538 on hockey and 'the hockey mom' on the republican ticket, and advice for the dems:

"Sarah Palin is not a hockey mom"

She's a hockey player. She’s a fourth-line hockey agitator, beloved by the home crowd, loathed by the opponents, injecting passion into both fan bases, the kind of home-team hero that no Stanley Cup winner goes without.
Once upon a time, I applied an NFL-replay mentality to hockey playoffs, holding on to outrages over missed calls, blatantly unfair officiating, double standards, and outright getting-away-with-stuff (which always led to an early spring exit for my beloved Blues). I wanted – and unreasonably expected – bad behavior to be proportionally punished.

I've been a hockey player on and off for over 30 years and 538 nails it.  I typically eschew sports and military analogies but this is a good one.

I've already spent far too much digital ink on the Palin issue.  For me it is an issue because it touches a nerve.  Simply put, I am afraid of theocrats (religious fundamentalists) gaining too much power, and McCain's choice puts a hard-core theocrat too close to large levers of power.

So.. game on.  No more hand-wringing posts.  Time to mobilize and get to work.  Only a couple of months until election day.

palin: average isn't good enough (harris, la times)

from Sam Harris, one of my favorite people:

So let us ask the question that should be on the mind of every thinking person in the world at this moment: If John McCain becomes the 44th president of the United States, what are the odds that a blood clot or falling object will make Sarah Palin the 45th?
The actuarial tables on the Social Security Administration website suggest that there is a better than 10% chance that McCain will die during his first term in office. Needless to say, the Reaper's scything only grows more insistent thereafter. Should President McCain survive his first term and get elected to a second, there is a 27% chance that Palin will become the first female U.S. president by 2015. If we take into account McCain's medical history and the pressures of the presidency, the odds probably increase considerably that this bright-eyed Alaskan will become the most powerful woman in history.
As many people have noted, placing Palin on the ticket has made these final months of the already overlong 2008 campaign much more interesting. Is Palin remotely qualified to be president of the United States? No. But that's precisely what is so interesting. McCain not only has thrown all sensible concerns about good governance aside merely to pander to a sliver of female and masses of conservative Christian voters, he has turned this period of American history into an episode of high-stakes reality television: Don't look now, but our cousin Sarah just became leader of the free world! Tune in next week and watch her get sassy with Pakistan!
Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the "Who would you like to have a beer with?" poll question in 2004, and won reelection.

This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages -- and loses -- both necessary and unnecessary wars.

McCain has so little respect for the presidency of the United States that he is willing to put the girl next door (soon, too, to be a grandma) into office beside him. He has so little respect for the average American voter that he thinks this reckless and cynical ploy will work.
And it might. Palin's nomination has clearly excited Christian conservatives, and it may entice a few million gender-obsessed fans of Hillary Clinton to vote entirely on the basis of chromosomes. Throw in a few million more average Americans who will just love how the nice lady smiles, and 2009 could be a very interesting year.
Tune in next week and watch cousin Sarah fuss with our nuclear arsenal ... .
Sam Harris is a founder of the Reason Project and the author of "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation."

the mirrored ceiling (Warner, NYT)

worth reprinting in full (from NYT):

It turns out there was something more nauseating than the nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate this past week. It was the tone of the acclaim that followed her acceptance speech.

“Drill, baby, drill,” clapped John Dickerson, marveling at Palin’s ability to speak and smile at the same time as an indication of her unexpected depths and unsuspected strengths. “It was clear Palin was having fun, and it’s hard to have fun if you’re scared or a lightweight,” he wrote in Slate.

The Politico praised her charm and polish as antidotes to her lack of foreign policy experience: “Palin’s poised and flawless performance evoked roars of applause from delegates who earlier this week might have worried that the surprise pick and newcomer to the national stage may not be up to the job.”

“She had a great night. I thought she had a very skillfully written, and very skillfully delivered speech,” Joe Biden said, shades of “articulate and bright and clean” threatening a reappearance. (For a full roundup of these comments go here.)

Thus began the official public launch of our country’s now most-prominent female politician. The condescension – damning with faint praise – was reminiscent of the more overt misogyny of Samuel Johnson.

“A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs,” the wit once observed. “It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.”

Palin sounded, at times, like she was speaking a foreign language as she gave voice to the beautifully crafted words that had been prepared for her on Wednesday night.

But that wasn’t held against her. Thanks to the level of general esteem that greeted her ascent to the podium, it seems we’ve all got to celebrate the fact that America’s Hottest Governor (Princess of the Fur Rendezvous 1983, Miss Wasilla 1984) could speak at all.

Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?

You are not, I think, supposed now to say this. Just as, I am sure, you are certainly not supposed to feel that having Sarah Palin put forth as the Republicans’ first female vice presidential candidate is just about as respectful a gesture toward women as was John McCain’s suggestion, last month, that his wife participate in a topless beauty contest.

Such thoughts, we are told, are sexist. And elitist. After all, via Palin, we now hear without cease, the People are speaking. The “real” “authentic,” small-town “Everyday People,” of Hockey Moms and Blue Collar Dads whom even Rudolph Giuliani now invokes as an antidote to the cosmopolite Obamas and their backers in the liberal media. (Remind me please, once again, what was the name of the small town where Rudy grew up?)

Why does this woman – who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes — deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so “real”?

Because the Republicans, very clearly, believe that real people are idiots. This disdain for their smarts shows up in the whole way they’ve cast this race now, turning a contest over economic and foreign policy into a culture war of the Real vs. the Elites. It’s a smoke and mirrors game aimed at diverting attention from the fact that the party’s tax policies have helped create an elite that’s more distant from “the people” than ever before. And from the fact that the party’s dogged allegiance to up-by-your-bootstraps individualism — an individualism exemplified by Palin, the frontierswoman who somehow has managed to “balance” five children and her political career with no need for support — is leading to a culture-wide crack-up.

Real people, the kind of people who will like and identify with Palin, they clearly believe, are smart, but not too smart, and don’t talk too well, dropping their “g”s, for example, and putting tough concepts like “vice president” in quotation marks.

“As for that ‘V.P.’ talk all the time … I tell ya, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me, What is it exactly that the ‘VP’ does every day?” Palin asked host Lawrence Kudlow on CNBC sometime before her nomination. “I’m used to bein’ very productive and workin’ real hard in an administration and we want to make sure that that ‘V.P.’ slot would be a fruitful type of position.”

And, I think, they find her acceptably “real,” because Palin’s not intimidating, and makes it clear that she’s subordinate to a great man.

That’s the worst thing a woman can be in this world, isn’t it? Intimidating, which appears to be synonymous with competent. It’s the kiss of death, personally and politically.

But shouldn’t a woman who is prepared to be commander in chief be intimidating? Because of the intelligence, experience, talent and drive that got her there? If she isn’t, at least on some level, off-putting, if her presence inspires national commentary on breast-pumping and babysitting rather than health care reform and social security, then something is seriously wrong. If she doesn’t elicit at least some degree of awe, then something is missing.

One of the worst poisons of the American political climate right now, the thing that time and again in recent years has led us to disaster, is the need people feel for leaders they can “relate” to. This need isn’t limited to women; it brought us after all, two terms of George W. Bush. And it isn’t new; Americans have always needed to feel that their leaders were, on some level, people like them.

But in the past, it was possible to fill that need through empathetic connection. Few Depression-era voters could “relate” to Franklin Roosevelt’s patrician background, notes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “It was his ability to connect to them that made them feel they could connect to him,” she told me in a phone interview.

The age of television, Goodwin believes, has made the demand for connection more immediate and intense. But never before George W. Bush did it quite reach the beer-drinking level of familiarity. “Now it’s all about being able to see your life story in the candidate, rather than the candidate, with empathy, being able to relate to you.”

There’s a fine line between likability and demagoguery. Both thrive upon manipulation and least-common-denominator politics. These days, I fear, this need for direct mirroring — and thus this susceptibility to all sorts of low-level tripe — is particularly acute among women, who are perhaps reaching historic lows in their comfort levels with themselves and their choices.

Just look at how quickly the reaction to Palin devolved into what The Times this week called the “Mommy Wars: Special Campaign Edition.” Much of the talk about Palin (like the emoting about Hillary Clinton before her) ultimately came down to this: is she like me or not like me? If she’s not like me, can I like her? And what kind of child care does she have?

“This election is not about issues,” Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager said this week. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” That’s a scary thought. For the takeaway is so often base, a reflection more of people’s fears and insecurities than of our hopes and dreams.

We’re not likely to get a worthy female president anytime soon.

hypocrites

gingrich in pearls

...as somebody waggishly tagged Sarah Palin, had her coming out party in St. Paul last night.  Good job reading from that teleprompter.

Now it is time for the press to do it's job and ask her some serious questions about her record, allegations of corruption, what her specific ideas are about what she would do in office, etc.  For example:  What exactly did you do with all that money for the 'Bridge to Nowhere' that you claim to have prevented?  The money (a lot of money) was never returned to the Federal Government.

Isn't it ironic that these fucking idiots out in the sticks who drink the deepest from the federal trough are the same ones who gleefully launch vitriol at the federal government?  Irony is apparently too subtle for them.

Of course, Palin and her ilk have no ideas of the thoughtful variety.  I suppressed the gag reflex and watched the video of her acceptance speech.  It was pure red meat politics for the audience wingnuts, and it had zero substance. 

The thing that surprises me most about Palin is her incredible arrogance (arrogance and stupidity make for a bad combination) and the cynicism of the McCain campaign who apparently believe that (a) she and Obama and equivalent, or worse, that her record is superior and (b) women are stupid enough to vote for her even though her political beliefs are somewhere to the right of Pat Buchanan.

The selection of Palin really tells you everything you need to know about McCain:From Time/Joe Klein:

Both the major-party candidates for President have now made their first major decision — on a running mate — and I can't remember a year when the selections were more revealing about the character of the candidates. What we have is a choice between a conservative and a radical.

The conservative is Barack Obama. He is a careful man, perhaps to a fault. His vice-presidential selection process was quiet, orderly and comprehensive. The selection of Joe Biden was no great surprise — he added experience to the ticket, a reliable loyalist and gleeful attack dog, a working-class Roman Catholic with a terrific personal story. The process was in keeping with the rest of Obama's candidacy: he has taken no great risks. His policy positions are carefully thought out and eminently reasonable, reflecting the solid middle ground of a Democratic Party that is more united on substance than I've ever seen it.

This small-c conservatism is, in part, a calculation. Obama doesn't want to seem angry or threatening, for obvious reasons. But it is also a reflection of who he really is: a fellow who does not like to disappoint anyone, who is obsessed with finding common ground. That may be a great advantage in a President at this ugly moment in our history — but I would feel more comfortable with Obama if he took an occasional play from John McCain's book of partisan transgressions and gored some Democratic oxen. It would be nice if he, say, challenged the teachers' unions, which didn't support him anyway and whose work rules choke out any chance of creative experimentation in the public-school system. Or if he stood against the atrocious Farm Bill, which spreads unnecessary fiscal fertilizer upon an already profitable industry. Or if he didn't feel the need to promise a tax cut to 95% of American families.

But Obama's weakness for undue prudence seems downright virtuous compared with the recklessness that McCain showed in choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. He had months to make this choice, but he allowed it to come down to a chaotic scramble in the last week — a reaction, it seems, to the fact that the Republican Party elders had vetoed his first two choices, Senator Joe Lieberman and former governor Tom Ridge. McCain wasn't going to give the bosses the choice they wanted — Mitt Romney — and he cast about, deciding on Palin, an occasional maverick, at the last minute. He had never worked with the governor. He had spoken to her a few times. His team, it now seems clear, had not vetted her very well. In her first appearance alongside McCain, she claimed to oppose the "bridge to nowhere," that Alaskan icon of pork mythology, but she had supported the bridge until it was clear that the hullabaloo would prevent it from being built.

As the week progressed, it became apparent that Palin stood diametrically opposed to McCain on issues large and small. She passed a windfall-profits tax on the oil companies — the very sort of tax that McCain excoriated Obama for favoring — which successfully swelled the coffers of the Alaskan treasury. She didn't believe global warming was a man-made phenomenon; McCain had confronted Republican orthodoxy on that issue — boldly, at first, and timidly more recently.

Palin was a blatant porker when she was mayor of Wasilla, hiring a lobbying firm to rake in the projects; she was close to the corrupt megaporker Senator Ted Stevens, a frequent McCain adversary and champion of the mythic bridge. Rather than putting "country first," her husband had been a member of a local secessionist fringe group called the Alaskan Independence Party, whose slogan is "Alaska first," and Palin apparently attended or spoke at several of the group's meetings. Her lack of interest in foreign policy and national security was the opposite of McCain's obsession with such issues. She called the Iraq war a "task that is from God."

Indeed, it seemed Palin and McCain held common ground on only two high-profile issues — an admirable rebelliousness when it came to their party's hierarchy and their opposition to abortion rights. Given the fact that McCain's top two choices for Vice President, Lieberman and Ridge, favored abortion rights, it would not be unfair to conclude that McCain's devotion to this issue was more political than personal.

The Palin selection — peremptory, petulant — was another example of McCain's preference for the politics of gesture over the politics of substance, as is his sudden fondness for oil exploration ("Drill here, drill now.") and hair-trigger bellicosity abroad (Syria, Iran, Russia). His lack of interest in actual governance is disappointing; his aversion to contemplation seems truly alarming. He has done us all a favor with this pick: he has shown us exactly what sort of President he would be.