Month: October 2008

Halfway There

by digby

Steve Waldman at BeliefNet has published their political survey of what they call the “twelve tribes” of American religious belief. It is fascinating stuff. Quite a bit has changed since 2004, most especially the fact that the so-called values voters are far more interested in their own pocketbooks than in what other people are doing in hospital beds and bedrooms. But that’s not all:

The 2008 Twelve Tribes survey, conducted from June-August, also found:

• A massive shift among Latino Protestants is what has fueled the hugely important move of Hispanics to the Democratic Party (more).
• The centrist Tribes – Convertible Catholics, Whitebread Protestants and Moderate Evangelicals – have moved to the left on some social issues but have become more suspicious of government spending programs. Republicans remain strong with these groups (more).
• Much more.

Click here for the McCain-Obama breakdown, the full survey results, the methodology or Steven Waldman’s full analysis.

It’s all interesting, but the most important finding may end up being that one about the centrist tribes becoming more suspicious of government:

Based on the new Twelve Tribes study, there are three groups that hover in the middle: Whitebread Protestant, Moderate Evangelicals and Convertible Catholics. In some ways, they’re ripe targets for the Democrats in 2008: All of them have turned against the Iraq war, all of them care more about the economy than they used to, and two of them (Moderate Evangelicals and Convertible Catholics) have become more pro choice and more pro gay marriage. However, all three have actually moved to the right on the critical issue of whether to have more government services. That would indicate that economic anxiety has led them to be more suspicious that bigger government would hurt rather than help them. Obama’s emphasis on tax cuts and McCain’s emphasis on cutting spending both would appeal to these groups. In the survey, conducted by Prof. John Green of the University of Akron, respondents were asked whether they wanted to have fewer government services “and reduce spending accordingly” or the more services. The percentages saying they wanted fewer services and less spending:

• Convertible Catholics: 2004: 26%, 2008: 38%
• Whitebread Protestants: 2004: 31%, 2008: 37%
• Moderate Evangelicals: 2004: 23%, 2008: 39%

Waldman says the shift from “values” to economics:

…creates huge opportunity for Barack Obama to win over voters who might otherwise find him too liberal on social issues.

But Democrats can easily misread this data. Many of the swing voters care more about the economy but have not moved to the left in terms of what they want done. For instance, 26% of Convertible Catholics wanted fewer government services; now 38% do. The economic message needs therefore to be one about more jobs and lower taxes, not about more government social programs. There’s still a lot of residual suspicion about big government liberalism, possibly even more now than four years ago.

I hope nobody listens to him on that or Obama is going to end up being Herbert Hoover instead of Bush.

I actually fault the allegedly liberal side of the Religion Industrial Complex for focusing on abortion and “values” when they should have been working with these people to deprogram them on economic issues. It is not surprising that a large number of Americans are skeptical of government. They have been relentlessly propagandized for years to believe that government is incompetent and then the conservatives took over and proved it. After the last eight years, why would anyone think the government can solve problems? Under Republicans it only creates them.

That’s why if Democrats win they have to do double duty to not only govern properly, but be prepared to argue that conservative policies of endless tax cuts under all circumstances, deregulation, laissez faire capitalism and imperial militarism are the problem — not government itself. If they don’t, they will have no room to maneuver through these huge challenges confronting us — the people have no other vocabulary or frame of reference than conservative propaganda with which to understand the crisis.

It does seem that our long national nightmare of being politically held hostage to far right religious ideology is over and I thank the Deities for that. But progressives haven’t even begun to make the explicit argument against the Right’s economic policies and that’s got to be done if they are to have the support they need to govern successfully.

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Delusions Of Zombies

by digby

Is it something in the Republican bar-be-que sauce recipe that causes this?

McCAIN: I think it’s very possible that both of those teams — both the Dodgers and the Red Sox — could surprise everyone.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Boy, well those are two class organizations —

McCAIN: — but that shows you why I’m not a rich man. [laughs]

And this, from our Dear Leader:

“I’ve been to war. I’ve raised twins. If I had a choice, I’d rather go to war.”Houston Chronicle, January 2002

Do they think nobody will notice?

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The Last Frontier

by digby

The New York Times featured a piece this morning asking various people what questions they would ask the VP candidates.

This is something only an Alaskan can say without being accused of being an elitist by Republicans:

Governor Palin, as we both know, Alaskans are a special breed. I grew up in Fairbanks, a few hundred miles north of Wasilla. I was proud to live on the frontier, far from civilization. Like many Alaskans, I lived in a log house on a dirt road, with no city water, sewer system or trash collection. We didn’t get much from our government, and we didn’t want much.

I love my frontier state, but the first thing I learned when I moved to the Lower 48 was how unlike the rest of the country Alaska is. How would you govern America when as mayor and governor, you hardly had to provide basic public services? In Wasilla, less than a tenth of the town is connected to the sewer system.

Alaska’s economy runs on oil proceeds — we don’t even pay income tax. And despite our disdain for Washington, we are given hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government each year. How would you handle our financial crisis when you’ve never had to balance a budget while tax revenue fell?

— RACHEL KLEINFELD, the executive director of the Truman National Security Project. Read more from Ms. Kleinfeld on the Campaign Stops blog.

Now, it’s true that a lot of federal money goes to Alaska for “defense” and a lot of it goes for native Americans and to support a population that is isolated and out of the mainstream. As a good liberal, I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with federal largesse to create jobs and support populations where there aren’t a lot of opportunities. (The Bridge to Nowhere type projects were a disgrace because they gave a lot of money to rich friends of Ted Stevens, for very few jobs or long term benefit.)

But, what this writer says is absolutely true. I also lived in Fairbanks for many years and as I wrote on the day Palin was nominated, it’s not just like a foreign country, it’s like a foreign planet. And they have the weirdest amalgam of libertarian/socialist politics anywhere in the world. Alaska is not like the rest of the country and being a politician there does not prepare one for national leadership. It’s not to say that combined with other experiences (as fine Alaskan politicians like Tony Knowles or Nick Begich have) that you couldn’t be prepared, but Palin is so limited that she literally knows nothing else.

Alaska is a great and beautiful place with some of the most interesting and intelligent people I’ve met anywhere in the world. I’m married to an Alaskan and many of my closest friends still today are Alaskans. For every two wingnut weirdos, there is one incredible environmentalist nature lover or poet or liberal individualist who has chosen to live an authentic and vibrant life outside the suburban or urban hustle and flow.

But Sarah Palin isn’t one of them, even though she fooled a fair number of them by blindly stumbling into some popular political decisions when the Republican political establishment in the state crashed in a corruption scandal. Many of them have been as appalled by her ignorance as the rest of the country. And any one of them would be more qualified to be Vice President than she is.

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Change Of Season

by dday

I know that the media can only focus on one thing at a time, but this is a very sensitive moment for Afghanistan. US commanders and international diplomats alike are seeing a scenario that is very close to being lost.

The cable, written in French, paraphrases the 53-year-old British ambassador as saying:

The security situation is bad and getting worse.

The Afghan people have lost all trust in their current government, partly because of corruption.

The presence of foreign troops in the country is part of the problem, propping up the current regime and thus slowing progress toward Afghans putting a more effective government in place.

Sending more military reinforcements to Afghanistan would have a “perverse effect” on the country’s stability and future, sending the message that an occupying force is in control of the country and widening the number of targets for insurgents to attack.

That last two are important. Many have this view that adding forces is all that’s needed to stabilize a security problem. Call it “the Iraq delusion.” John McCain has outright said this, that we need a “surge” in Afghanistan the way we surged in Iraq. Of course, the commander of NATO forces on the ground knows that the two countries aren’t even remotely comparable:

First of all, please don’t think that I’m saying there’s no room for tribal engagement in Afghanistan, because I think it’s very necessary. But I think it’s much more complex environment of tribal linkages, and intertribal complexity than there is in Iraq. It’s not as simple as taking the Sunni Awakening and doing the Pashtun Awakening in Afghanistan. It’s much more complex than that.

But there are countless other differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, it’s such a poor country, by any set of metrics you can imagine. A country that has very harsh geography. It’s very difficult to move around, getting back to our reliance on helicopters. It’s a country with very few natural resources, as opposed to the oil revenues that [Iraq] has. There’s very little money to be generated in terms of generated in Afghanistan. The literacy rate — you have a literate society in Iraq, you have a society that has a history of producing civil administrators, technocrats, middle class that are able to run the country in Iraq. You do not have that in Afghanistan. So there’s educational challenges, challenges of human capitol that I mentioned earlier.

So there are a lot of challenges. What I don’t think is needed — the word that I don’t use in Afghanistan is the word “surge.” There needs to be a sustained commitment of a variety of military and non-military resources, I believe. That’s my advice to winning in Afghanistan. It won’t be a short-term solution.

Of course, McKiernan also wants more troops, so while he doesn’t use the word “surge,” he at least thinks that adding forces can only have a salutary effect on the country. There is Afghanistan as we knew it in 2002, when a grateful nation was happy to have help in getting rid of the Taliban, and there is Afghanistan today, where the public has lost faith in the government, the Taliban is controlling major sections of the country, and those who have endured six years of aerial bombing don’t see NATO troops as saviors.

… I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that six or seven years later, we can just roll up our sleeves and rededicating ourselves to achieving the goals we were told we achieved years ago. The situation has changed, windows of opportunity open and close, and our mission has gotten very murky. Oftentimes when this kind of operation goes on long enough the goal becomes “succeeding” — or, rather, doing something or other that whoever’s in charge of the operation could plausibly label success. But we need to think, instead, more concretely about what it is we’re hoping to achieve in Afghanistan — specifically, does preventing portions of Afghanistan from serving as a base for terrorist operation directed at the United States really require us to establish an effective central state in Afghanistan?

That is the key question that I don’t think either Presidential candidate has answered. They are arguing for an intervention in Afghanistan circa 2002. Time has changed circumstances.

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Conservative Family Values

by tristero

Here’s a question for you: Who’s the bigger asshole, William or Christopher Buckley?

Before he died, William F. Buckley Jr. put his young grandson on the firing line.

The intellectual conservative icon – renowned for his erudition and use of uncommon words – excluded his son’s illegitimate child from his massive estate, insisting the kid was dead in his eyes.

“I intentionally make no provision herein for said Jonathan, who for all purposes . . . shall be deemed to have predeceased me,” Buckley’s will says, according to the Hartford Courant.

The National Review founder and notable New Yorker instead left his entire estate – estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars – to his only child, Christopher Buckley, and Christopher’s two older kids, Caitlin and William.

Jonathan, now 8, is the product of an Christopher’s affair with book publicist Irina Woelfle.

Caitlin, 20, and William, 17, are the author and former presidential speechwriter’s children with his now-estranged wife, Lucy.

Woelfle currently works as a publicist in Florida, where she filed suit against Christopher, seeking more child-support money.

Christopher, 56, author of the satiric novel “Thank You for Smoking,” pays $3,000 a month. But Woelfle’s petition says their son has special needs, and she’s looking to put him into a private school near her Coral Gables home.

The suit, which was obtained by the Courant, pins the blame for some of the boy’s behavioral problems on Christopher’s complete lack of involvement.

“The father is notably absent from the minor child’s life,” despite the mom’s efforts to try to get him involved, the suit says.

These people are truly sick.

Leading Contender For Greatest Darwin Award Winner Ever

by tristero

Astounding:

A Metrolink engineer driving a commuter train sent a text message about 22 seconds before the train collided with a Union Pacific freight train last month, the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday.

That’s about as stupid as it gets. Then again, even now, Bush’s popularity is unconscionably high so maybe they’re a lot of folks who would have done the same thing:

Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the way President Bush is handling the economy, while 78 percent of Americans disapprove. Even a majority of Republicans disapprove of the President’s handling of this issue.

Overall, the president’s approval rating has dropped five points from last week and is now the lowest of his presidency. Only 22 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing, while 70 percent of Americans disapprove – a new high.

Special note for the satirically-challenged amongst us: Of course I know that’s incredibly low. That’s the joke…oh, never mind.

By the way, I remember, when I was pointing out – tongue firmly planted inside cheek – that Bush in the low thirties was way too high, that commenters primly lectured me that 1/3 approval represented the hard core base of BushSupport, that it really couldn’t get much lower and I just should accept it. Heh, indeed.

Don’t be surprised if Bush makes it to around 15% before he slithers back to his sea-ment pond in Crawford. And even that is an undeservedly high approval.

Meanwhile, I have a text message I need to send…

Helsinki: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

by tristero

I haven’t been in Helsinki, a city I love in a country I love, since the summer of 2000, just before darkness descended upon America. At the risk of sounding like the lazy reporter who asks the taxi driver from Heathrow a couple of questions and writes, “All England thinks…,” I’ve noticed three things that have changed:

The Good: The air is a lot cleaner. According to a friend, this is because Finland now has to meet the EU emission standards for gasoline and also because there are more new cars on the road. Before, the air was far dirtier than any American city I’d been in including (sorry, my blogging colleagues) Los Angeles. Now, the air quality is actually pretty good.

The Bad I don’t recall legalized gambling eight years ago (someone please correct me), but now, at least, the RKioskis – kind of like 7/11s – have electronic slots and lottery betting parlors. The machines have been quite busy when I’ve stopped in for phone cards and magazines. It’s very depressing. As I’ve written many times, state-sponsored gambling is an unfair tax on the innumerate and uneducated. It’s sad to see it here. UPDATE: I stand corrected. According to Hirvox in comments, gambling and lottery parlors have been around for decades. It’s still depressing, even if the money is used for good purposes.

The Ugly The use of English has grown exponentially (and pardon my grammar). English signage has, in many places, overwhelmed Finnish and Swedish. Some cafes, restaurants, and hotels don’t even bother displaying signs in anything but English. I suspect this has something to do with Helsinki as a more popular tourist destination than it was, as well as a certain trendiness among the newly rich (the number of luxury foreign clothes shops in Helsinki seems to have at least tripled). It’s a real pity as Finnish, to a non-speaker like myself, is a deeply rich and strange language, oddly beautiful to hear and nearly unique. It is part of the Finno-Ugric language family, related to Hungarian, but really just about in a class by itself (Estonian is the only one I’ve heard personally that’s close). There is a great pleasure in encountering a delicious word like mustikkapiirakka -a pretty simple and brief word for Finnish – and trying to figure what it could possibly be (go ahead, look it up). Sadly, translations now are ubiquitous. Even more striking, I’ve heard several younger Finns speak English with near-perfect Northeast American accents. In other words, at least in some schools, they’re teaching American English, not British English, these days. UPDATE: Silly me, who never watches TV if I can help it. A linguistics major informed me that her perfect American accent was due to all the American television series that are on.

Oh, so far, every Finn I’ve met can’t possibly understand why the American election is so close. Then again, you don’t have to be Finnish to think that. You just have to be sane.

Lobbying For Failure

by digby

I have to conclude that the Bush administration and the Republicans actually want the bailout bill to fail. There can be no other reason for them to do this:

Bush lobbies Congress to pass $700B bailout bill

Bush lobbies hard for $700B bailout bill to stabilize financial sector, help avert recession

Read More…

Again, I’m not being entirely facetious. Bush is the most unpopular president for the longest sustained period in history. He is a leper to anyone who wants to be re-elected. The markets know that he is completely incompetent and powerless. Floating the news that he is lobbying hard for this thing actually works against its passage. But maybe that’s what they actually want.

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Delightful Dinosaurs

by digby

John McCain is saying that the Georgetown party circuit is turning up its snobby collective nose at Sarah Palin because she’s such a down-to-earth gal whom they hold in disdain. (Sally Quinn said that John McCain is “an absolutely delightful dinner partner,” however.) And in one way, he’s right.

Kathleen Parker, who has gained an incredible amount of cache among the cognoscenti lately for saying that Palin should resign from the ticket, claims that she knows nothing of the Georgetown party circuit:

“I haven’t gotten an invitation yet, but I am available,” said Parker, who splits her time between Georgetown and tiny Camden, S.C. She said most of her big-city socializing consists of sidewalk chats, occasionally involving dogs.

You see, she’s just a down to earth gal too — just like Palin. Isn’t that something?

Palin is upending all the normal assumptions. You have the allegedly down home Parker wandering around Georgetown with her muttssaying that Palin is unqualified — and everyone acts as if that’s some sort of shocking development. But Parker is the person who wrote a book called “Save The Males”

Beginning with a history of the female empowerment movement, Parker explains how for the past 25 years, males have been indoctrinated from the schoolhouse on the idea “women good, men bad.” She lays out the history of this phenomenon as she sees it, beginning in 1989 when Harvard professor Carol Gilligan claimed research showed that girls were drowning in a patriarchal education system. From that research, feminists and liberals latched onto the idea that girls suffered from low self-esteem. An all-out effort was launched to push girls to the front of the line and praise their every effort – often at the expense of boys.

Much of Parker’s arguments put the plight of males squarely on the shoulders of these feminists and liberals as well as an ongoing campaign by Hollywood and advertisers to portray men as dolts and women as capable and efficient. Even schools have gotten into the act, rewriting textbooks that now devote as much space to women as to men. On this topic, Parker relates, “This is a nice idea, except that women simply haven’t accomplished as much as men in the areas that make history. I know this is blasphemy, but there’s no way around the facts. Women have done great things, no doubt. Radium! Madame Curie, you rule! … Martha Washington was a great woman to be sure, but she did not, in fact, lead the American Revolution. George did, and it’s his face, not hers, on the dollar bill. We have to try to deal with that.”

Now, I’m not saying that Sarah Palin is qualified. She certainly has proven in spades in the last few days that she is woefully unprepared for the job. But Parker is hardly a credible critic, considering that she believes pretty much all women aren’t particularly accomplished and that trying to change that is unfair to men. I am unimpressed wit her “startling” realization that Palin should remove herself from the ticket.

But what of our other doyenne of Georgetown, who loves sitting next to the delightful dinner companion, John McCain. (Does he playfully whisper “you lovely trollop” in her ear do you suppose?) Perhaps she is more credible on the issue.

Here’s her view:

KURTZ: Ed Henry, does any of this make you cringe? I mean, when Joe Biden tragically three decades ago was in a car accident where his wife and one of his kids was killed, nobody said, oh, how could he take his Senate seat because he’s got two young kids at home who need a father? I mean, these are questions that seem to be asked of women.

ED HENRY, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Right. I think you’re absolutely right.

I don’t think Sally’s a pinhead, just for the record, and I have admired her work for a long time.

QUINN: Thank you so much.

HENRY: But I can’t believe what I’m hearing from you though, Sally, and I can’t believe what Emily said, basically that, you know, how could she be a mother and be vice president? Why are you not saying the same thing about Barack Obama? He’s a father of two young daughters who look quite beautiful.

How could he possibly, then, by this standard you’re creating, go to Washington and be president, which I assume is more important than vice president, we would all agree or just as important? And why are you not questioning whether he could be a good father?

I just think there’s a double standard. And I thought the whole point of women having equal rights was that they could have a family and a career. And secondly, that men, as fathers — and I’m a father — should be just as active as the moms are. So I don’t understand.

KURTZ: Let me get a brief response from Sally.

QUINN: It ain’t going to happen. I mean, men and women are different. Every single one of my friends — I’ve been a working mother for 26 years — every single friend practically that I have is a working mother.

They are constantly in a state of guilt and conflict. They take on the burden of the child rearing, and the husbands do not. Men and women are different, and every mother and every father knows that in his or her heart.

Again, Palin is a dramatically unqualified candidate and deserves the ridicule she is receiving for her utter lack of knowledge about …well, anything. I’m not defending her. But I think we all have come to realize that her guilt and conflict as a working mother is the least of her problems.

Both Parker and Quinn are completely full of shit. Palin is unqualified purely on her own, individual merit as a politician. Let’s make sure we don’t put them on some sort of feminist pedestal just because they criticized her. In fact, where the two of them are concerned, McCain is right. They are a couple of snooty rich elites who believe that women (other than themselves) should lead lives proscribed by traditional gender roles. Their problem with her isn’t her basic lack of knowledge — they believe that no woman in her position should run for office no matter how qualified and intelligent she is. It’s not the same thing at all.

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Not Just Ignorant But Destructive

by dday

It’s not just that Sarah Palin can’t name another Supreme Court case besides Roe v. Wade – wait, OK, it is that. But there’s something more here, something that will offend the intelligence of more than merely all rational Americans. She believes in the Constitutional right to privacy.

Couric Why, in your view, is Roe v. Wade a bad decision?

Sarah Palin: I think it should be a states’ issue not a federal government-mandated, mandating yes or no on such an important issue. I’m, in that sense, a federalist, where I believe that states should have more say in the laws of their lands and individual areas. Now, foundationally, also, though, it’s no secret that I’m pro-life that I believe in a culture of life is very important for this country. Personally that’s what I would like to see, um, further embraced by America.

Couric: Do you think there’s an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution?

Palin: I do. Yeah, I do.

Couric: The cornerstone of Roe v. Wade.

Palin: I do. And I believe that individual states can best handle what the people within the different constituencies in the 50 states would like to see their will ushered in an issue like that.

I don’t know if she believes in the right to privacy or if she believes in the words “right” and “privacy” and saw them together and took a stab at it. But this is a major, MAJOR no-no for the fundies and the wingnuts. She undermined the entire intellectual argument against Roe without even recognizing it. Taking her logic (if it can be called that), if there’s a Constitutional right to privacy then there’s a right to keep medical decisions confidential, not a state’s right but a fundamental Constitutional right.

This is about 35 years’ worth of arguments crashing down right now. If any backlash could cost her the nomination it would be over this. This reaches into Harriet Miers territory.

On a couple other notes:

1) Given that Palin is now personally responsible for saving Katie Couric’s job, is there any kickback scheme in the offing?

2) Given that the gobbledy-gook answers that randomly generate at InterviewPalin.com are actually starting to be less surreal than what comes out of her mouth, have we reached a subject that is invulnerable to parody?

3) Do we really know whether or not Sarah Palin is Sacha Baron Cohen’s greatest role?

…Incidentally, tomorrow night I’ll be on the Mike Malloy show right after the debate with Brad from Bradblog and Marcy “emptywheel” Wheeler and others discussing the VP debate. Tune in from 10:30pm-midnight for an antidote to the spin room.

Check your local listings.

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