Science Guide

Ok, this post will be political.

Note this chart:

Hat tip to Liberals Must Die; surf there to read the discussion. Better yet, dress up like a wingnut and contribute! :)

Barack Obama's book: Dreams From My Father. I reviewed this book here. This New York Review of Books article compares Obama's book to James Baldwin's book Notes of a Native Son.

One very short paragraph:

Had their ambitions been less focused and their personalities less complex, Baldwin and Obama could easily have become pastors, preachers, leaders of black churches. But for both of them there was a shadow, a sense of an elsewhere that would form them and make them, eventually, more interested in leading America itself, or as much of it as would follow, than merely leading their own race in America. Both of them would discover their essential Americanness outside America, Baldwin in France, the home of some of his literary ancestors, Obama in Kenya, the home of his father.

This essay talks about how both of these men were influenced by their absent fathers and how both men were influenced by their relationships to other countries (France in Baldwin's case).

Local Politics: IL-18. Peoria Story (award winning journalist Elaine Hopkins) talks about hitting the campaign trail for Colleen Callahan. Callahan is running against Republican Aaron Schock, who is running for Ray LaHood's seat in Congress. Rep. LaHood is probably best known for chairing the House Impeachment Proceedings against President Clinton; he is retiring from his position.

This post contains some photos.

State of the election: Barack Obama is looking good in the swing states.

[...]The McCain campaign's decision this week to abandon Democratic-leaning Michigan is the most obvious and dramatic sign, a major tactical retreat that limits the ways he can reach the magic number of 270 electoral votes on Nov. 4.

But McCain is in as bad or worse shape in other battleground states. Barring a dramatic change, he is on course to lose Iowa and New Mexico, both states barely won by President Bush four years ago in his narrow victory over Democrat John F. Kerry. And he and the Republican National Committee this week began pouring money into Indiana and North Carolina, reliably Republican states where the Obama campaign has made strong advances and polls indicate the candidates are roughly tied.

The Obama campaign, meanwhile, has responded this week by significantly increasing its television advertising budget in Indiana and five other states and has even spent $350,000 to air spots continuously on a satellite TV channel, a first for a presidential hopeful.

The pendulum of the race has swung each way more than once over the course of the campaign, and with a month and two debates remaining, McCain has opportunities to recover.

But the Obama surge, coinciding over the last 10 days with the crisis on Wall Street and the debate over a federal bailout, has left McCain on the ropes in eight states with a combined 101 electoral votes that Bush carried four years ago. The Republican is slipping further behind not only in Michigan, but also in four other states that went Democratic four years ago, but which McCain hoped to pull into the GOP column this year.

By contrast, McCain does not lead Obama in any state that Kerry captured in 2004. That year, Bush beat Kerry by 35 electoral votes - 286 to 251 (one elector from Minnesota voted for Kerry's running mate, John Edwards). [...]

But one month is an eternity in politics. I think of it this way: if this were a football game, it would be the start of the 4'th quarter and we'd be up 28-13. Yes, you'd rather be us than them, but they are still two big plays plus a 2 point conversion out of it. They are down, but hardly dead.

Slate has starting properly updating their election future data again:

Iowa Electronic: Obama 75.0, McCain 23.4
Intrade: Obama 69.9, McCain 31.0

Remember these are "winner take all" numbers based on popular vote. The "percentage/share" numbers are difference (where one bets on whether a candidate exceeds a certain percentage of the popular vote).

More Sarah Palin and our Culture War

Why am I so obsessed with her? I have an idea: I dislike her on a personal level that I haven't felt for almost any other political figure, except for Ronald Reagan during his first 6 years.

George W. Bush? I really didn't dislike him until he went public with his determination to take us to war. Had he not been so eager for war, I wouldn't have felt such disgust. Believe it or not, though I voted for Gore in 2000, I actually liked some of the stuff that he said during the campaign.

Dick Cheney? Vile, but mostly I disrespect his actions. I have a grudging respect for his intellect.

John McCain? Wrong on the issues, not that bright and ill tempered. But basically I like him; I see him as sincere but misguided and simply not smart enough for the job.

But Sarah Palin physically makes me ill. No, it isn't that she is a powerful woman; I actually like Hillary Clinton. It isn't that she is a conservative woman; though I disagree with her, I like Condoleezza Rice. I like Kathleen Parker too.

It isn't that she is an attractive, outspoken woman; I like Barbara Boxer and Kathleen Sebelius.

Part of my dislike of Palin stems from what appears to be phoniness; the winking, flirting, etc. But then again, I don't dislike Katherine Harris to the same degree, so that isn't it.

I think much of it comes from the fact that Palin is really an icon for the current culture war between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. Here is a creationist who "speaks in tongues", has very little in depth knowledge, and yet considers herself as qualified for the job. Even worse is that there are lots of idiots who approve of her.

To me, she represents almost all of the worst stereotypes of the typical red-state American.

One thing I do like about her though: she keeps in superb physical condition; she has run a 3:59 marathon.

So anyway, here are my Palin tantrums of the day:

Hat tip to Dependable Renegade. But she is, in some ways worse that Dick Cheney: she isn't as smart and capable as he is.

Of course, the Republicans are whining about the fact that more and more women are disapproving of Palin.

Belinda Luscombe for Time Magazine: Women are abandoning Sarah Palin. Why might that be?

Luscombe's answers:

* Women are weapons-grade haters.

* 1. She's too pretty. This is very bad news. At school, pretty girls tend to be liked only by other pretty girls. The rest of us, whose looks hover somewhere around underwhelming, resent them and whisper archly of their "unearned attention."

* 2. She's too confident. This also bodes ill. Women have self-esteem issues. But they also have other-women's-esteem issues.

* 3. She could embarrass us.

At risk of being branded a weapons-grade hater, let me say I have no desire to sit down with Belinda Luscombe, underwhelming-looking woman to underwhelming-looking woman, and discuss our resentments and self-esteem issues over a mani-pedi.
[...]

I won't resort to speaking for "some women," though I'd wager I'm accurately characterizing at least as many as you are. But speaking for me, I don't resent Sarah Palin's looks. I do resent that, when her talking points fail her, she exploits her looks by winking at the camera and wrinkling her nose and talking in a flirty-girly voice to get out of any expectation that she, you know, be qualified for the job she's seeking.

Her confidence? I have never been a fan of people over-confident to the point of believing themselves deserving of things they are not qualified for. The list of people on whom I train my weapons-grade hate for that sin includes far more men than women, for the simple reason that in my life I have come across more men than women with that kind of sense of entitlement.

She could embarrass us, as in Women? If I were a Republican I would be worried about the enormous embarrassment she was to my party. But then, if I were a Republican, I'd already have my hands full being embarrassed at John McCain's erratic behavior, disregard for the truth, temper, and lack of connection to any kind of honor or principle. That's not a gender thing, that's a Republican thing. And I'm not so insecure for my gender that I worry one aggressively ignorant and incompetent woman can undermine me-as-woman.

Emphasis mine.

More from the London Review of Books:
(hat tip to Seattle for Barack Obama)

Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man. In 1980, Ronald Reagan profitably tapped the movement with his promises of states’ rights, low taxes and a shrunken government in Washington; the ‘Reagan Democrats’ who crossed party lines to vote for him are still the most targeted demographic in the country. In 1992, Ross ‘Clean out the Barn’ Perot and his United We Stand America followers looked for a while as if they were going to up-end the two-party system, with Perot leading George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the midsummer polls. In 1996, Pat Buchanan (‘The peasants are coming with pitchforks’) appealed to the same bloc of voters with a programme that was militantly Christian, white, nativist, provincial, protectionist and anti-Washington. In 2000, Karl Rove cleverly enrolled this quasi-Poujadist faction in his grand alliance of libertarians, born-agains and corporate interests. It’s worth remembering that in 2004 every American city with a population of more than 500,000 voted for Kerry, and that the election was won for Bush in the outer suburbs, exurbia and the countryside – peasants with pitchforks territory. For an organisation so wedded to its big-city corporate clients, the Republican Party has been hugely successful in mopping up the votes of low-income, lightly educated rural and exurban residents.
[...]

What is most striking about her is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness.

And to what I hate the most about her:

But as politicians of both parties in Alaska have discovered, underestimating Palin nearly always turns out to be a fatal error. For – when on form – she has the ability to connect with that surly mass of occasional, floating voters who feel themselves to have been disenfranchised by more orthodox politicians and who respond to her as a paragon of domestic good sense and decency in a world rendered ever more incomprehensible by the dark arts of the elites.

She belongs to no elite. After drifting through five colleges in six years, she eventually secured a degree in journalism at the University of Idaho, less ivy than sagebrush league. Short of majoring in chiropractic, she could hardly have had a higher education less offensive to the Limbaughites. As Obama stands tarred in their eyes by his Columbia and Harvard connections, so Palin represents the healthy values of the church and the outdoors against those of the deeply suspect East Coast universities.

Importantly, she’s unimpressed by ‘science’, whether it’s the science of evolution, anthropogenic climate change or the Endangered Species Act. In a period of stagnant wages and rising unemployment, science has been vilified as the enemy of working-class jobs in such industries as mining, timber, agriculture and construction. It is also – especially in the phrase ‘best available science’ – very widely seen as the cause of unpardonable infringements of individual property rights. When, for instance, Palin contentiously advocates drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she both promises well-paid jobs and champions the precious American liberty to do what the hell you like in your own backyard. Likewise, her fight against listing the polar bear as an endangered species, even as the sea ice melts under its feet – which has entailed blandly denying the findings of her own state scientists – sits well with a large, disgruntled rural sector of the population which has seen jobs lost, mills closed and property devalued in order to protect such critters as the northern spotted owl and the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly. The director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance says that her motto is ‘cut, kill, dig and drill’ and that she lives ‘in the Stone Age of wildlife management, and is very opposed to utilising accepted science’. For many voters, that’s ample reason to see her as a folk hero.

Please read the whole article; he exposes the lie that she was a "cut government to its bear essentials" type of mayor.