Beyond School

Georgia:

“One good thing about Jennifer Hudson’s family tragedy – two less Obama voters.”

A 57-year old grandmother is killed in her home, as is her 29-year-old son. A seven-year-old child is missing and there is every reason to fear for his survival as well.

And [a reader who commented as] “Dagny and John’s Love Child” expresses pleasure that two Obama voters are now gone.
–Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

North Carolina:

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — The Cape Fear BBQ and Chicken Restaurant. Some powerful and at times ugly interaction today.

12:33 p.m. Sen. Barack Obama entered the barbecue joint where an older and majority white clientele of dozens was eating lunch after church services. At the other end of the restaurant, Diane Fanning, 54, who works at a discount club, began yelling: “Socialist, socialist, socialist -– get out of here!”

….Later, Obama came to the long table where Fanning and other members of a local First Presbyterian church were gathered. He held out his hand to her to shake it and asked, “How are you, ma’am?” but she declined to shake.
–LA Times

Tennessee:

Korea:

It’s after midnight and my wife thinks I’m brushing my teeth and coming to bed. Instead, I’m holed away here in my writing corner, needing to get something off my chest at what, you’ve surely noticed, may be a world-historical moment, whether you’re an American or not. I’ve tried to get it right and don’t feel I’ve succeeded. But I want to put it out anyway, in time to meet that moment.

~ ~ ~

Last Things First

I’m a 46-year-old man, a white minority in an interracial marriage in Korea.

Many people in my adopted country look down on my wife for marrying me. They look down on me too. They stare. They occasionally try to menace. They say things in their language that they think I don’t understand. I catch enough words to get the gist.

Other people here, though – my in-laws above all – accept me, value me, and show me through their actions things that feel like love. They help me when I don’t even ask.

You need to know that before you read on.

A Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist

The Winner’s Ticket

I spent my first eighteen years in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a scenic little rhinestone studding the Bible Belt in the American South.

When I was about eight years old, around 1970, I was the bat-boy for my older brother’s baseball team. I wore the team uniform with pride, indifferent to the laughs it drew for being several sizes too big.

One night, the team played a city championship game of some sort in the city’s semi-pro Lookout Stadium, in downtown Chattanooga. It was a big affair for us little boys.

Two things were interesting about that night.

The first is trivial, though I want to read meaning into it, and it’s simply this: out of two thousand or so tickets drawn from in a raffle before the game, my ticket was a winner. I remember the laughter as I went onto the field in that oversized uniform to claim my Louisville Slugger baseball bat, emblazoned with Hank Aaron’s signature. The 34-inch bat was as oversized for my eight-year-old frame as was the uniform, but I was proud of that Hank Aaron. Aaron was a Southerner on a Southern team – Go, Atlanta – and even though he was black, he’d set the world on fire by breaking Babe Ruth’s record for most career home runs.

I’m convinced my ticket was drawn because, having no idea what a raffle was and thinking that ticket was just an admission ticket, I had wadded it up as trash and thrown it under my seat as soon as I sat down. When someone came to our section to collect the tickets, a teammate of my brother’s – his name was June, and he was African-American – helped me find it, and tossed it in the box for me.

To this day I still maintain there was a lesson there: The hand that drew my ticket felt something different when it hit that wadded thing among all the flat, straight ones. My ticket won because it was different. I’ve wadded my tickets in every raffle from that day to this. And since then – though usually not by accident – I’ve also wadded up and discarded much of what I was taught was right in my childhood.

The Loser’s Joke

The second thing that happened that night occurred as we rode home after the game.

There must have been more than one vehicle taking the team back to the school, because I was surrounded on that ride home by only white players. June and the other black players were not in the back of that truck with us.

We sat in the open bed of that truck riding under a very fine night through the very worst slums of the city. My brother’s team must have won, because spirits were high all around. These bigger boys hooted, they hollered, they filled the night with their voices. Some of those voices, as we drove through this poor neighborhood, cried off-color things.

I must have wanted to impress them, and so gave it a shot – with the earliest instance of rhetorical sophistication in my entire life. At the appropriate lull in the noise, I filled the silence in that sad neighborhood’s night by yelling, at the top of my eight-year-old lungs:

“Welcome to Nig*ertown, USA! Population: Too many!“

“Population: Too many!” – What a great line. Almost as good as “Two less Obama voters.”

Citadel Yearbook 1977

It was a hit for many of the older boys. They slapped me on the back, congratulated my brother for having a little brother with such wit, and for that brief moment, I was on top of the world. With that one joke, I seemed to have suddenly grown into that uniform.

But that world was the wrong one, and there are hopeful signs it’s dying now. And that uniform? It’s wrong too, and too small for us all.

I’m a 46-year-old man, a white minority in an interracial marriage in Korea. Many people in my adopted country look down on my wife for marrying me. They look down on me too.

Thinking back on that childhood moment, I wonder if any darker-skinned boy or girl, sitting on one of those anxious porches or stoops in that fine night, heard that happy line. I suspect several did. And I wonder if they still remember it, like I do, almost forty years later. Again, I suspect they do.

It’s too late to say I’m sorry to them. But it’s not too late for a different amends.

Baptised in Bigotry

Monday School in Dixie

Though my family didn’t go to church beyond the occasional Christmas or Easter service, my childhood was nonetheless suffused with the Southern Baptist brand of Christianity. I’ll only point at the regular visits to my elementary school of a sweet little lady we called “Mrs. Methuselah.” Her real name I’ve forgotten, but not her blue hair and palsied voice, which croaked out Bible stories as her bony, blue-veined hands manipulated felt Bible characters on an easel – all at taxpayer expense. Because of her visits, I remember to this day the names “Shadrach, Meschach and Abednigo,” though I’ve long since forgotten their story.

I also remember this verse:

“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the glory of God lasts forever.”

I wrote that verse in crayon in a little state-sponsored, constitution-violating scrapbook she assigned us to keep. I Scotch-taped some grass from the school lawn underneath it that obligingly turned brown after a few days. Beside the grass, for good measure, I taped a dead flower, and drew above them both – framed with a jagged border I hoped suggested lightning – a stern, bearded God. I was a very good student in those days, doing whatever teacher told me to do. Being a Good Boy was for some strange reason extra-important to me. It still is today, with the difference that now I want to be a Good Man.

Anyway, this was 1968, probably. My first year of school. First grade.

At that time, of course, I had no idea my country was dropping napalm on peasant farmers and their families in thatched huts on the other side of the world – surely at the very moments this good woman was giving us these lessons. John McCain probably had no idea he’d soon fall from those skies himself, alongside his payload, while I was still learning my ABC’s, Matthew Mark Luke and Johns, and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednigos in a public school.

Scott’s House

Scott was my best friend in those years. I spent as many days at his home as I did in my own. Scott’s mother and father were second parents to me, and good people. The bookcase and side-tables in their living room were full of books by an author whose name I, the good first-grader, was proud to be able to read: the Reverend Billy Graham.

Scott had a couple of sisters, though, who were already in high school when we were in first grade. Scott and I would often go into their bedroom when they weren’t around, and I can still remember other names I first became aware of in that household, names attached with images on the sisters’ many vinyl LP records: Joan Baez. Bob Dylan. Joni Mitchell. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Jimi Hendrix.

I remember being struck with how different these names felt in comparison to Reverend Graham.

Desegregation is "communist" work of "anti-Christ": Some things don't change. Little Rock, Ark., protest, 1959.

Stefon, Cedric, General, and Scott’s Father

Elbert Long Elementary and Junior High School must have been desegregated a few years before I entered first grade there. At eight years old, I was as clueless about that milestone in American history as I was about those Asian farmers in thatched huts who were daily aflame, literally, via the same tax dollars that paid the good old lady to teach me about fading flowers, withering grass, and glory of God.

All I knew was that I was a six-year-old with classmates who were about 50% dark-skinned and 50% light-skinned. My otherwise decent grandparents called the dark-skinned ones “niggras.”

~

I'm front row, center. Stefon and General are in the third row.

Besides Scott and some other whites, I had friends whose names were as different as their skin-tone: Stefon Talbot, whose spondeed first name was as distinctive as the long-lashed white eyes shining like pearls from his smooth, jet-black face; Cedric Winston, so much bigger than the rest of us we called him “Big Boo,” whose preacher-father equipped him with some hymns that made us laugh to tears when he performed them; and most memorable of all, General Lee Webster. General was not a nickname like Boo – it was birth-certificate official. General had a tougher life than Stefon and Boo – not as handsome as Stefon, not as gently parented as Boo, and infinitely more beetle-browed and bug-eyed than both of them, with a forehead twice as high as normal – and it showed in his hair-trigger temper. Thinking back on him now, General was a black Mercutio to my Romeo, and I loved him.

We all lived near school, and we all walked to and from it. Often, after school, we’d walk together to each others’ homes, to the mall, to all the places we roved in those days.

One day at Scott’s house, his Southern Baptist, Billy Graham-revering father pulled me aside and, with great concern and gravity, asked me, “Clay, why did I see you walking with that black boy on E. Brainerd Road?”

“That black boy” was General.

Coach Moser Teaches History

I’ve changed all the other last names in this story, but I’m not changing Doug Moser’s. Mr. Moser was my junior high art teacher and, more importantly, baseball and wrestling coach. He was new at our school when, now age 12, General, Scott, Stefon, Boo, and I entered seventh grade in 1974.

Coach Moser, seated left. Scott behind him, left. Me standing, right.

I don’t know much about Doug Moser’s background, beyond that his accent marked him as an outsider to the South. Thinking about him now, I’m struck by the fact that he coached several sports but didn’t, like most coaches, teach health or physical education – he taught art. And that suggests he had something in him refined, something cultured. I know that now because I’m a teacher, and know that teachers teach subjects, typically, that they liked in college.

Doug Moser was also, I suspect, fairly new at teaching. He looked to be in his twenties, so he couldn’t have been that far out of college, and while he was married, he and his wife had no children. But the biggest clue to his newness was his classic “new teacher” attempt to create true, caring, authentic relationships with his students.

He invited General, Scott, and me to come with him and his wife to a college wrestling tournament one weekend. He paid for the tickets, he paid for the cokes and hot dogs – and he paid with the disillusionment. My friends and I were too young and immature to appreciate his gesture; instead, we slurped the cokes and wolfed the franks while obsessing – for a ridiculous thirty minutes at least, as we sat in the bleachers two rows behind him and his wife – on some stupid chant we’d created around his name. “Middi-mo, middi-mo, middi-mo.” We chanted it over and over, laughing hysterically at this unfunny play on the name “Mr. Moser,” while he sat awkwardly with his wife, pretending it wasn’t happening. We never had a decent conversation with him that whole day.

He never invited us to a second outing. A teacher now myself, I understand why: I tried similar things, and got similar results. I’ve experienced that sad gap, as Joni Mitchell would sing, “from both sides now.”

But I liked Mr. Moser. In his art class thirty years ago, I was drawing a still life of an ear of corn. He eased up behind me, and very quietly said – I think this is verbatim – “Nice. You’ve got a good eye.” And that felt calming, affirming, good to hear – so good, I remember the corn and the man and his words now, at 46. I remember very little else from those years so clearly.

In short, Doug Moser seems to have been an athlete, an artist, an outsider, and an idealistic young man. And while my bone-headed friends and I disappointed his idealism at that wrestling match, we later, he told us, redeemed it.

Baseball and Race, Take Two

It happened at another baseball game. I was about the age of my brother that night I disgraced myself in the back of that truck by shouting my harmless little genocidal joke.

We had lost the game. We were in the locker room, sullen and self-important over this bit of stick-and-ball-centered trivia, when a few boys walked in who weren’t on the team.

They were all African-American.

One of them spouted some trash about our loss that rubbed me the wrong way, and I told him to shut up. A cliche stand-off followed and we finally came to blows. As usual, I probably took more punches than I threw, but who cares. All my fights back then (and I hope it’s so for kids today) were always broken up before they got dangerous, and this one was no different – with one exception: My friends separated us by pulling me back by my arms. This rendered me defenseless, and my enemy took full advantage of this by landing a free punch or three to my face. The punches didn’t hurt, and it wasn’t serious. Soon that whole gang was persuaded to leave the locker room.

We went back to showering and changing clothes, until somebody came into the locker room with some news: There was a gang of black boys waiting to jump me outside the building.

Again, though I didn’t understand it then, this was 1974 – exactly a decade after the Civil Rights Act ended Jim Crow and racial segregation. My friends and I were guinea pigs in the progressive “social engineering” decried by so many conservatives and reactionaries.

My teammates – not only Scott, but also Stefon, “Boo”, and General – surely didn’t understand this either. They just did what was natural to them: they protected their friend by walking out with him, and stood by him when that gang appeared – and they faced that gang down. I got home safely because of them.

The next school day, there was the schooly disciplinary thing, with the predictable slapped wrists and all of that. But afterwards, at baseball practice, Coach Moser gathered us up for a talk. And in that talk, he interpreted what was just a schoolyard fight to us as the slice of progressive American history it was. He told us that he was not proud of the fact that there was a fight, but that he was proud that in that fight, watching the white boy’s back against the black boys, were other “black boys”: Stefon, Cedric, and General. They had taken sides based not on skin color, but on something deeper. And he was proud of them.

Years earlier, in a little harmless American genocidal humor, I had joked that the black population should be decreased.

Coach Moser interpreted that moment in my young life in a way that taught me something important.

First Things Last

I’ve left my Southern roots and, like that raffle ticket, become something different. Many other Southerners have too, thank goodness, as the polls show. They’re voting for the more intelligent and respectful candidate – who happens to be darker-skinned – instead of the reactionary ticket indulging in smears cloaked in unAmerican Stars and Stripes and unChristian Crosses.

So goodness bless Ms. Betty Waylett, the fellow churchgoer of Ms. Fanning, the lady who refused to shake Obama’s hand in that North Carolina diner, and bless the church’s Pastor Bremer, too, who’s voting McCain for reasons other than race, for their remarks in that LA Times article:

[Obama] spoke at length with many of the other parishioners at the long banquet table, however, and got a much friendlier reception as he spoke about healthcare, taxes and Social Security. Fanning told the pool reporter, “Some of them are just nicer than I am. I know how some of them think.”

But several of her fellow churchgoers said their support was genuine. Betty Waylett, 76, told him, “You’re doing a great job.” She told the pool reporter she is a Republican but will vote for Obama because she likes the way he speaks and his manner.

Waylett, who is white, said Obama’s race was not a factor. “I never thought about it one way or the other.”

Pastor Randal Bremer, also at the table, said Obama told him, “Whether you vote for me or not I’ll need your prayers.” Bremer told the pool reporter, “I’m very impressed by his ability to meet people on a down-to-earth level” and that he would pray from him but that he planned to vote for John McCain, mostly because he prefers smaller government and McCain’s position on the Iraq war.

Scott’s father was a good man, but – Reverend Billy Graham and all – a weak one. He couldn’t apply the Golden Rule of his faith unto all others. “That black boy” – “that one” named General Lee Webster – was closer to any god than the good Southern Baptist father of my white friend.

A different ticket, a welcome change.

Stefon, Cedric, and General sided with me against their skin color because they knew I was on the right side. I was on the wrong side when I poisoned that childhood night in a poor neighborhood with that shameful “Rebel Yell.” And I’m siding with Barack Hussein Obama because I believe he’s on the right side as well.

Doug Moser saw history when the desegregation experiment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 redeemed itself in our schoolyard ten years later. That was the beginning. I didn’t think I’d live to see the culmination of that experiment in the election of an African-American president of the United States in my lifetime.

I’m awed to discover I may be wrong. I want to see more history on November 4. I want to see an America – and my American South, in particular – that has learned that race, while nothing we should vote for, is also nothing we should vote against.

Images:
Hank Aaron by Jaboobie
Citadel Yearbook
Little Rock Brown v. Board of Education protest: Lib. of Congress

• David Sedaris: Undecided: Humor: The New Yorker

  Sedaris skewers undecideds in 2008. Classic.

  tags: sedaris, writing, humor, satire, elections08

  • I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

    To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

    To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

    I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

• The Power of Passive Campaigning – Stanley Fish Blog – NYTimes.com

  A wonderful reading of Obama’s comportment throughout his campaign – by comparing him to Christ (and McCain to Satan) in Milton’s _Paradise Regained_.

  Some fine writing and fine insight in this one.

  tags: obama, mccain, elections08

  • When did the Democrats smarten up? When did they learn how to outdo the Republicans at their own game?

    The answer is that they didn’t. They decided — or rather Obama decided — to play another game, one we haven’t seen for a while, and it’s a question as to whether we’ve ever seen it. The name of this game is straightforward campaigning, or rather straightforward non-campaigning.

    We saw it in the 10 days when the activity around the mounting economic crisis was at its height. Henry Paulson alternated between scaring members of Congress and scaring the public. Nancy Pelosi alternated between playing the responsible Congressional statesperson and playing the partisan attack dog. Media commentators went from one hysterical prediction to another. John McCain went from saying there’s nothing to worry about to saying there’s everything to worry about to saying that he would fix everything by suspending his campaign to saying that he was not suspending his campaign and that he would debate after all.

    And Barack Obama? He didn’t do much and he said less (O.K., he did say some reassuring, optimistic things), and his poll numbers went up.

  • Weeks later, the pattern continues, but in an even more intense form. The McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to charge: Obama consorts with terrorists; he’s a socialist; he’s a communist; he is un-American; he’s not one of us; he’s a celebrity; he’s going to take your money and give it to people who never did a day’s work; he’s going to sell out Israel; he’ll cozy up to foreign dictators; he’s measuring the drapes.

    In response, Obama explains his tax policy for the umpteenth time, points out that capitalists like Warren Buffet support him, details his relationship with Bill Ayers, lists those he consults with, observes that Senator McCain, by his own boast, voted with President George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, and calls for change.

    What he (or his campaign) doesn’t do is bring up the Keating Five, or make veiled references to McCain’s treatment of his first wife, or make fun of Sarah Palin (she doesn’t need any help), or disparage his opponent’s experience, or hint at the disabilities of age. He just stands there looking languid (George Will called him the Fred Astaire of politics), always smiling and never raising his voice.

    Meanwhile, McCain’s surrogates get red in the face on TV when they try to explain away the latest jaw-dropping thing Sarah Palin has said, or proclaim that anything can happen in seven days, or respond to ever more discouraging poll numbers by saying (how’s this for a weak cliché) that the only poll that counts is the poll on election day. (I know things are bad when my wife, a staunch Democrat, feels sorry for them.)

  • What’s going on here? I find an answer in a most unlikely place, John Milton’s “Paradise Regained,”

• Op-Ed Columnist – The Widening Gyre – NYTimes.com

  This year’s Nobel economist on why Bush and Co. aren’t playing smart in the economic crisis: free market fundamentalism, even after socializing it.

  tags: economy, usa, bush, capitalism

  • Meanwhile, U.S. policy makers are still balking when it comes to doing what’s necessary to contain the crisis.

    It was good news when Mr. Paulson finally agreed to funnel capital into the banking system in return for partial ownership. But last week Joe Nocera of The Times pointed out a key weakness in the U.S. Treasury’s bank rescue plan: it contains no safeguards against the possibility that banks will simply sit on the money. “Unlike the British government, which is mandating lending requirements in return for capital injections, our government seems afraid to do anything except plead.” And sure enough, the banks seem to be hoarding the cash.

    There’s also bizarre stuff going on with regard to the mortgage market. I thought that the whole point of the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lending agencies, was to remove fears about their solvency and thereby lower mortgage rates. But top officials have made a point of denying that Fannie and Freddie debt is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government — and as a result, markets are still treating the agencies’ debt as a risky asset, driving mortgage rates up at a time when they should be going down.

    What’s happening, I suspect, is that the Bush administration’s anti-government ideology still stands in the way of effective action. Events have forced Mr. Paulson into a partial nationalization of the financial system — but he refuses to use the power that comes with ownership.

    Whatever the reasons for the continuing weakness of policy, the situation is manifestly not coming under control. Things continue to fall apart.

• Op-Ed Columnist – In Defense of White Americans – NYTimes.com

  I hope he’s right. There’s evidence he is.

  tags: obama, racism

  • As we saw first in the Democratic primary results and see now in the widespread revulsion at the McCain-Palin tactics, white Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn’t mean that the country is racist. It’s past time to come to the unfairly maligned white America’s defense.

  • But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.

    Nor is America’s remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been hoping for it to be. There are even “racists for Obama,” as Politico labels the phenomenon: White Americans whose distrust of black people in general crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people, including a presidential candidate who extends a genuine helping hand in a time of national crisis.

• Op-Ed Columnist – The Endorsement From Hell – NYTimes.com

  On Al Qaeda’s endorsement of John McCain. Perceptive, interesting argument about the effects of the election on terrorist recruitment prospects.

  tags: obama, bush, mccain, binladen, terrorism

  • Yet the endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

    “From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is best for recruiting,” said Professor Nye, adding that Mr. McCain is far more likely to continue those policies.

    An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits.

• BBC NEWS | UK | You can run… but can you hide?

  tags: privacy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Mark Nickolas: What Political Malpractice Looks Like (The B Team That Ran The McCain Campaign Into The Ground)

  tags: mccain, elections08

• Daily Times – Leading News Resource of Pakistan – Obama and McCain strategists are worlds apart

  tags: no_tag

  • DAVID Axelrod, the political consultant behind the stunning rise of the Democratic White House hopeful, does not brim over with joy. With his heavy-lidded eyes and bushy moustache, he looks like a shy professor. But appearances are deceptive. Without sharp elbows and acute antennae, the former political reporter could never have emerged as the preeminent campaign operative in the cut-throat world of Chicago politics. Axelrod, 53, has carved out a niche by helping to package African-American candidates for a white electorate. But with Obama, whom he has known for 17 years, his motivation appears intensely personal. Electing Obama president would be “something you could really be proud of for the rest of your life,” he told the New York Times in January 2007 as the Illinois senator prepared to announce his historic candidacy.
  • More broadly, Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe were the architects of an ambitious nationwide electoral strategy that now appears to be paying off for Obama as McCain plays defense in what should be “red’ Republican bastions. In the process, the Obama campaign has built an astounding fundraising operation fueled by Axelrod’s signature belief in “grassroots” politics driven from the ground up. But echoing Obama, and betraying his own natural pessimism, Axelrod is taking nothing for granted. He told reporters last week: ‘We’re going to fight every day between now and November 4 to get our message out. Nothing’s over until it’s over.”

• Palin’s Nightmare—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)

  Worthwhile read.

  tags: bush, neocons, palin, socialism, satire, elections08, orwell

• Early e-voting results in vote flipping in three states so far – Machinist – Salon.com

  Troubling.

  tags: democracy, technology, elections08, usa

• New Yorker: Barack Obama is a socialist? – The New Yorker- msnbc.com

  tags: mccain

  • There is a whole shelf of books on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs its old punch. “At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation.

• IHS :: HNN :: Einstein’s God: A New Book Explores the Scientist’s Spirituality

  A good fact-check on the “Einstein was a Theist” canard.

  tags: books, science, religion, history, atheism, non-theism

  • “I am a deeply religious non-believer,” Einstein wrote in a letter to his friend and colleague Hans Muehsam, in 1954. “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

    However, his philosophy firmly excluded a belief in the supernatural or a Creator-God.

    Todd Macalister’s new book Einstein’s God: A Way of Being Spiritual without the Supernatural, (Apocryphile Press, Berkeley; 2008) explores the scientist’s views on spirituality as expressed through his lectures and personal papers.

• Daylight Atheism > Skin Deep – Annotated

  The writer on this site is so worth reading.

  tags: religion, science, education, racism, creationism, evolution, usa, culture, christianity, atheism

  • I’ve been reading this account of a disciplinary hearing against the odious John Freshwater, an Ohio science teacher who allegedly promoted religion in his class, repeatedly and illegally, even after being ordered by school administrators to stop. Among other things, Freshwater brazenly taught creationism in class – directing his students to Answers in Genesis and giving extra credit to those willing to see the anti-evolution documentary Expelled. Most infamously, he was accused of using a Tesla coil to burn a cross onto a student’s arm.

    However, I want to focus on a different aspect of this story. As often occurs, this case has divided the community, with the religious students who support Freshwater intimidating and demonizing those who don’t:

    Students carried Bibles to class last spring to support Freshwater.

    Classmates of Arie Alvarado questioned her and a few other eighth-grade students who didn’t take part.

    “They were calling us atheists,” Alvarado said. “I couldn’t believe it. One day they’re your friend, and the next day you’re an atheist and they’re completely ignoring you in the hallway.”

    • If any of you students or teachers out there have direct knowledge of this happening in your own school, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment or use the contact form in the sidebar. – post by cburell

  • Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being an atheist – although many of the Dover plaintiffs were not. Still, the reaction of these hostile believers is telling. They think that the worst insult you can hurl at somebody is to call them an atheist, as though someone’s not believing in God necessarily implies that they’re an immoral and evil person.

    We’ve seen this sort of demonization before. All too often, believers judge atheists based solely on our lack of belief, not on our actions or our character. It’s another manifestation of the pernicious human tendency toward tribalism, which religion does much to encourage.

    Tribalism is a tendency that’s always been with us, stamped deep into our brains by evolution. It’s the urge to label and categorize people, to sort them into groups, and then to judge them based solely on which of these groups they give their allegiance to. Even when tribal distinctions are completely arbitrary, human beings can be passionate to the point of zealousness about them (consider sports fans), even to the point of violence (consider sports riots). And when tribal membership is determined by religion, which most people consider a far more integral part of their identity than sports fandom, the consequences of irrational tribalism are far worse. Those who are outside the tribe, who are labeled as “the Other”, will inevitably be blamed by tribe members for everything that is evil and frightening in the world.

    • My favorite riff on this, coming from my years living in China, is that BUDDHISTS are RELIGIOUS, but also NON-THEISTIC (at least if they know original Buddhism).

      They’re also the least dogmatic religion, which is probably why wars and terrorism almost never involve Buddhist causes. – post by cburell

  • A moral and rational person judges others as individuals, not on the basis of tribal allegiance. The labels we wear, by themselves, say nothing about a person’s ethics or character. The only way to learn what kind of person someone is is to get to know them, to understand what they care about and what motivates them, and what kinds of ideals they want to see realized in the world. This is as true for atheists (or for theists) as it is for any other group.

    The advocates of tribalism want to bypass all this. They want to find some superficial mark of good character, one which immediately determines whether someone is good or evil, Friend or Enemy, One of Us or Other, without having to know the person as a whole. And, if you think about it, this is really no different from what racists do; it’s just that they fixate on a different superficial characteristic. Although racism is retreating, anti-atheist bigotry is still openly practiced. We can achieve much for the atheist cause by pointing out that equivalence.

    • Read David Sedaris “Us and Them” (search for posts on the story in my blog) for a beautiful and laugh-out-loud funny exploration of the Us and Them syndrome. – post by cburell

• Wikipedia for Schools — downloadable torrent of Wikipedia’s curriculum-relevant articles – Boing Boing

  tags: education

  • Wikipedia for Schools is a torrentable DVD version of Wikipedia that you can run on classroom PCs that aren’t connected to the net. It’s also a handy size for sticking on a memory card and plugging into your phone or netbook.

• BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | The treasure trove making waves

  Exciting finds.

  tags: archaeology, history, china, mideast

  • Ten years ago, at a spot known locally as “Black Rock”, two men diving for sea cucumbers came across a large pile of sand and coral.

    Digging a hole, they reached in and pulled out a barnacle-encrusted bowl. Then another. And another.

    They had stumbled on the oldest, most important, marine archaeological discovery ever made in South East Asia, an Arab dhow – or ship – built of teak, coconut wood and hibiscus fibre, packed with a treasure that Indiana Jones could only dream of.

    There were 63,000 pieces of gold, silver and ceramics from the fabled Tang dynasty, which flourished between the seventh and 10th centuries.

• Former GOP senator, vet backs Obama – Alexander Burns – Politico.com

  A Vietnam vet ex-senator breaks with McCain to vote Obama.

  tags: elections08, conservative, obama

  • Former Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), who was the first Vietnam veteran to serve in the United States Senate, is the latest Republican to back Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, Politico learned Sunday.

    Pressler, who said that in addition to casting an absentee ballot for Obama he’d donated $500 to the Illinois senator’s campaign, cited the Democrat’s response to the financial crisis as the primary reason for his decision.

    “I just got the feeling that Obama will be able to handle this financial crisis better, and I like his financial team of [former Treasury Secretary Robert] Rubin and [former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul] Volcker better,” he said. By contrast, John McCain’s “handling of the financial crisis made me feel nervous.”

    The former senator added that he hoped the next president would help place restraints on executive pay, and said: “I don’t think [McCain] will take action in that area, or he’s as likely to.”

  • He joins a growing list of Republicans who have thrown their support to Obama in recent days. Last Sunday former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Obama on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” On Thursday Obama picked up the support of former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, who was joined on Friday by former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld.

    Like some of Obama’s other Republican supporters, Pressler said he had concerns about his party’s fiscal policy, particularly the war in Iraq, that went beyond the presidential campaign.

    “We have to be a moderate party. We can’t be for all these foreign military adventures. We have to stop spending so much money. My God, the deficit is so high!” he said. “The Republican Party I knew in the 1970s is just all gone.”

    Despite his support for Obama, however, Pressler emphasized that he intended to stay in the GOP and described himself as a “moderate conservative.”

    “I’m not leaving the Republican Party. We’re going to reform it,” he said, but added: “In the general election, if you have disagreements, you should not vote the party line.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Fellow Army vet and English teacher Jan Seiter and I had a dialogue on a comment thread that I want to share on this post. It will mostly be of interest to English and history teachers, I think.

I hope some of you weigh in. In the meantime, it gave me an opportunity to list my favorite ways of using blogs for both Learning to Write and - a very different thing – Writing to Learn.

Here goes:

Jan’s Opening Question and Comment:

My First Reply:

Re: factual accuracy: maybe a sidebar disclaimer saying “I’m young and possibly wrong sometime.” (If only FOX would do that. Or me.)

Or maybe just trust to the two-way nature of this medium to allow people to push back/correct errors  in comments.

The whole accuracy thing can be skirted by doing more creative stuff – personal narrative and so on, too.

And maybe a wiki instead of a blog so students can correct their stuff.

Re: conventions and mechanics: I’m a six traits guy myself, and am more concerned with the first five – ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency – than I am with grammar/spelling/punctuation. So I grade far more heavily for notable attention to those first 5 traits.

I want students to write freely and ideally discover they enjoy it. Perfectionism and fear of errors won’t create the conditions for that to happen. We’ll talk about errors after I’ve read enough volume from you to do an error analysis of your most frequent _serious_ grammar/spelling problems, which I’ll prioritize and teach to you one on one down the road.

Then you can select your five or ten favorite posts – which maybe I’ll score as a single test grade – and _correct those errors on only those posts_ to apply what you’ve learned/I’ve taught you to look for and correct.

I know this is sloppy, but it’s 1.40 a.m. and I’m replying to your contact communication.

Afterthought: I think students should have the option of not publishing if their work is too sub-par.

But realistically, practically nobody will find and/or read their blogs beyond other students, will they?

–

(To Add More:)

Since you told me in a private email that you were looking at the French Revolution Ant Farm Diary (right?), I’ve got more to say:

That was a formative project using “Writing to Learn” pedagogy. The point of the writing, above all, was for students to learn the material in this active way, rather than listening to lectures, reading the textbook, or other passive ways of learning. So the writing in this approach is secondary to the learning.

The summative assessment was an essay that did hold accuracy and writing at a premium.

And every time I use WTL, I’m amazed at how much deeper and broader the retention, comprehension, and insight are, compared to when I lecture, they discuss, or just read or watch stuff.

Have you ever used WTL? I’d be interested to hear your (and everyone’s) experiences with it.

Second Exchange:

Jan replied:

Clay,
Your approach is terrific and I am not questioning intent.

I teach high school & college English, media literacy, speech & debate, and have taught in all grade levels. I have used 6 traits and don’t think of myself as a grammar nazi.

Lately, I have been concerned with the declining (even by current standards) level of writing and content information that seems to be fostered by the web. Blogging, IMing and texting encourage stream of consciousness-type of writing; with no regard for logic, facts or conventions. I think this is fine for drafts and, well, this conversation.

I often tell my students, “Remember, you are writing for a college graduate, NOT your girlfriend,” in an attempt to make them slow their thoughts and process their communication. Still, I get final drafts that need additional editing, presentations with missing capital letters and assorted other errors that, when I point them out, they say, “Yeah, well, you know what I mean…”

I find this attitude in college writing, too. I have students of 20-30 even 40 years old who write without thinking of editing, who think that whatever they write should be accepted as their ‘best’ and who have little sense of thinking about WHO will read their work.

For me, it’s even become about respect. If I respect you, I will do all I can to make sure that my communication is clear and accurate. but if I don’t care who reads this, I can spel anway i want sdo touy will no whut i mean…

Don’t misunderstand that I am critiquing your projects, nor the work of your students. It’s that your projects got me thinking about this issue, and I used it as an example.

When we publish something, especially to the web, as a teacher, do we have the obligation of editing, or do we just post ‘as is’? Your comment (But realistically, practically nobody will find and/or read their blogs beyond other students, will they? ) begs the question of who is the audience?

My reply:

I sympathize with your concerns, Jan, and hope I didn’t sound defensive when I, oops, defended Writing to Learn.

I’ve seen the chatroom-ese on student work on blogs, forums, and wikis when I introduced them, but didn’t have much problem rooting them out with discussions of the respect you mention (and self-respect, since using “cuz”, e.g., in a public writing is like going to a job interview in dirty clothes). Most students got it and met the standard after that, and those that didn’t woke up after a few shocking bad grades.

But that could be specific to my private school students, whose moms rip them new orifices at the first A-, much less C-.

Online writing is definitely no silver bullet for writing, as I’ve argued a million times. Over time, though, and – crucially – in conjunction with 6-traits rubrics that set the standards for their writing from the quality of Ideas on down the line to Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Conventions and Mechanics, AND Presentation, I really have seen marked improvement in quality in all those traits, overall, AND in engagement. Wake-up grades, again, given early, were also key.

But we’re talking students here, so I’m not claiming miracles (and not suggesting you’re implying I am).

It’s the “over time” thing that’s key, to me.

I do think students who write because they’re forced, and probably see no lasting value in most cases to what is still, in the end, mere homework to most of them, will have a different attitude about what they publish compared to people who, like us, write voluntarily about things we care about.

And since it’s 9.24 a.m. this brisk Saturday morning, and I’m enjoying my first cup of coffee as I start the day thinking with you (which I enjoy too), I’m going to ramble a bit more.

There are so many different approaches to assignments, we both know, to inculcate whatever habits of mind or skills we’re working on in a given week. So I just want to toss off a few that come to mind:

1. The “comment on the teacher’s post” assignment:

Rather than students writing on their own blog, they do a specific task in the comment thread to the teacher’s. That way they see their work standing alongside that of their peers, and may be more motivated to look better and work harder, in order to avoid looking weak. I’ve done that with:

a. Syntactical variation exercises (sentence openings, e.g.): “Take this sentence and re-write it, using only the words in the sentence, in as many ways as you can.” If you moderate comments, they don’t see other students’ work until all have done the assignment. Then they can see and learn from other students’ responses. That’s a wickedly powerful affordance of online writing that is hard to duplicate offline. I posted about it here.

b. Introductory paragraphs (hooks): Copy and paste your “hook” from your first draft, and the revised version from your latest draft, into the comment thread, and briefly explain your writer’s decision that guided your revision. (There’s an entire class discussion of authentic writing right there, which my students enjoyed, because they were seeing what others had tried. The few successes were great cases of student modeling, and the weaker ones were great cases of cliche or otherwise dead introductions.) (You can see my Seoul and a flat world teacher’s Hawaii students doing this here.)

c. Titles. (Titles are a pet peeve of mine. “My Essay” from high schoolers makes my blood boil.)

2. Critical Thinking:

My latest Diigo Daily Reads auto-posts feature highlights (basically copy-pastes, though Diigo does that work for me by publishing only what I highlight from a web page) that I then respond to with sticky notes that do NOT summarize the reading, but instead either “challenge, extend, or qualify” the point. That’s an “ideas” sort of assignment that simply forces students to THINK about what they passively read. (See this post for a screencast on this approach.

3. Trait-based assessment of x number of student blog posts per unit for a test grade:

The biggest bear, for me, about student blogging and wiki work is the sheer volume. When I assign regular posts, I normally can’t assess them all with any depth. But I still want regular writing in the same way a PE teacher wants regular running to keep his/her students fit. So to allow students to self-select 3, say, while you randomly select 2 (whatever you work out, obviously), to grade by the rubric – either for all traits, or just one or two un-disclosed ones (since they won’t know, they’ll ideally give more care to all the traits), is the best solution I’ve come up with for this dilemma. The “teacher choices” keep them from shamming on the posts they won’t self-select.

Closer, for now: I haven’t taught long enough to be able to compare this generation of student writers from previous ones, so I don’t know whether their skills are any better or worse than in the past.

I do know that the elitist side of me wants to use student blogs in a highly selective writing elective class – see For the Roses: My Latest Position on Classroom Blogging for more – to simply rid myself of the headaches of dealing with the bums, so I’ve got my Delta Force of real writers who want to train.

I guess that’s my way of saying, “I hear you.”

I share this simply because I think Jan asks good questions, and I’m sure others have valuable input to add. Here’s hoping they do.

• Sarah Palin: the character question should rule her out :: Iain Martin – Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • In contrast to Palin, one of Barack Obama’s most attractive traits, alongside his sense of calm, is his flexibility, his adaptability and his willingness to consider his options and learn. That’s going to be of more use in the difficult years ahead than a politician who cannot be swayed by rational arguments or evidence. 

     

    • The criticism of Obama as “PROFESSORIAL” distorts the fact that he’s A LEARNER.

      It’s the ideologues who refuse to question their dogma – and we need look no further than creationists like Palin – who are more “elitist,” in their ignorant way. They “talk down to us” about their “knowledge” that “evolution is ‘just’ a theory” and reams of other tripe, which all demonstrate their smugness and (misguided) sense of intellectual superiority. – post by cburell

• Palin pushes McCain staff aside as blame game begins | csmonitor.com

  tags: no_tag

  • Properly vetted or not?

    And further, if she is was as ill-prepared as some McCain staffers are saying, then it would suggest that she was never properly vetted — something that was angrily taken off the table for discussion by the McCain team six weeks ago.

    But they can’t have it both ways. Either she was properly vetted or not. If she was properly vetted, then they knew what they were getting into. If she was not properly vetted, then they can only blame themselves for the selection.

• The Associated Press: Palin: Election isn’t over till it’s over

  Remarkable: Read the article, and you’ll find NOT ONE IDEA OR ISSUE DISCUSSED BY PALIN in the entire thing.

  Instead, there are attacks, innuendo, flirtation, and sarcasm.

  Just amazing.

  tags: palin

• Barry M. Goldwater, Jr.: Why Barry Goldwater Couldn’t Support Obama

  Interesting little tempest in the Goldwater family over the question of McCain.

  tags: conservative, elections08

  • Barry Goldwater was one of the icons of the Republican Party and, yes, would be unhappy with many of the recent failures from within. I speak about this all the time and how mad I am that Republicans have lost their way. However, we do not find our way back by sheepishly going over to the other side. My father worked to rebuild the party in 1964 by taking it back from the liberal Establishment. He would work to do the same thing today.

    CC does not help the Republican Party nor the cause by minimizing John McCain. McCain may not be everything she wants in a President or hold her exact values, but she should work within the party to promote the ideals Barry Goldwater stood for. Endorsing one of the most liberal Senators in Congress is certainly not the way to help fix any problem she sees; instead it is a betrayal of everything my father advocated government should be. My father would never endorse a candidate or a party that wanted to grow government, raise taxes or in any way step on our freedoms.

    Together the Goldwaters, including CC, should work together to redefine the Republican Party and make it the model Barry Goldwater Sr. stood for.

• CC Goldwater: Why McCain Has Lost Our Vote

  Goldwaters reach across the aisle to vote for Obama. More Republicans voting ideas and character instead of brand.

  tags: mccain, conservative, elections08

  • There always have been a glimmer of hope that someday, someone would “race through the gate” full steam in Goldwater style. Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened, and the Republican brand has been tarnished in a shameless effort to gain votes and appeal to the lowest emotion, fear. Nothing about McCain, except for maybe a uniform, compares to the same ideology of what Goldwater stood for as a politician. The McCain/Palin plan is to appear diverse and inclusive, using women and minorities to push an agenda that makes us all financially vulnerable, fearful, and less safe.

    When you see the candidate’s in political ads, you can’t help but be reminded of the 1964 presidential campaign of Johnson/Goldwater, the ‘origin of spin’, that twists the truth and obscures what really matters. Nothing about the Republican ticket offers the hope America needs to regain it’s standing in the world, that’s why we’re going to support Barack Obama. I think that Obama has shown his ability and integrity.

    After the last eight years, there’s a lot of clean up do. Roll up your sleeves, Senators Obama and Biden, and we Goldwaters will roll ours up with you.

• Palin allies report rising campaign tension – Politico.com Print View

  This is getting interesting, in a side-show way.

  tags: palin

  • Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain’s camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain’s decline.

    “She’s lost confidence in most of the people on the plane,” said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to “go rogue” in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

    “I think she’d like to go more rogue,” he said. 

• GOP challenges to new voters set back by courts – Politico.com Print View – Annotated

  Wonderful to see GOP-heavy Supreme Court show non-partisanship with these decisions.

  Not surprising to see George W. Bush disagree with them.

  The entire article is worth a read.

  tags: elections08, democracy, usa, bush, mccain

  • The battles are over a section of the Help American Vote Act, passed in 2002 by Congress to prevent another Florida-style recount. HAVA requires states to match information supplied on voter registration forms with department of motor vehicles and Social Security records.

    Individuals who provide information that does not match those documents may face confusion at the polls or be required to vote on a provisional ballot.

    But critics of the provision say inaccurate state databases lead to erroneous disqualifications. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law found that the matching process fails 20 percent to 30 percent of the time due to minor errors like database typos, use of nicknames, and multiple entries.

    “The general narrative of what’s going on with a lot of these cases is to attempt to limit the voters to who are participating,” said Georgetown law professor Jonah Goldman, director of the nonpartisan National Campaign for Fair Elections. “The central premise is that more voters help Democrats.”

    Republicans, however, say that the databases are a way to increase security at the polls and stop illegal registrations from becoming fraudulent voters.

    “Make no mistake, HAVA disenfranchises no one and protects the right to vote,” said Wisconsin Republican State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, state chairman of McCain’s campaign. “HAVA checks are an important safeguard — one mandated by Congress and state law — to help make sure those lawful votes are not diluted by unlawful votes.”

    • NOTE the research by NYU and the following testimony from Georgetown.

      Then NOTE the opposing viewpoint, from McCain’s campaign chairman in Wisconsin.

      Which parties seem more credible? – post by cburell

  • At the beginning of October, ACORN reported that it registered 1.3 million new voters. But further investigation found that 30 percent — roughly 400,000 registrations — were faulty in some way, either registered under fake names such Mickey Mouse, were duplicates or were incomplete. Republicans jumped on the findings, arguing that the group was proof of a systemic voter fraud campaign by the left.
  • But faulty registrations rarely turn into illegal votes. While ACORN has admitted to errors in its registration process, documented cases of illegally cast ballots remain rare. A five-year investigation by the Bush administration resulted in the convictions of only 26 voters found guilty of voting more than once, registration fraud, or ineligible voting.
    • In other words, the faulty registrations at ACORN result in ACORN losing money paid to the dishonest employees. They do NOT result in illegal votes.

      Read it: Bush commissioned the study that confirms this. – post by cburell

  • “This is not a plan that was hatched yesterday,” said Daniel Tokaji, an election law specialist at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. “The Republican party is using the whole ACORN rap as a justification for the stringent ballot security measures they are urging.”
  • Wisconsin election officials admit that their database incorrectly flags voters at least 20 percent of the time. When the six members of the state elections board, all retired judges, ran their own registrations through the system, four were incorrectly rejected.
    • HILARIOUS. – post by cburell
  • In Michigan, the Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign sued the Michigan and Macomb County Republican parties after learning of an alleged Republican plan to use foreclosure filings to keep some residents who’ve failed to update their address from voting. The suit settled last week and the information will not be used.
    • The cynicism of this one is only matched by its heartlessness. The Michigan GOP wanted to DISENFRANCHISE JOE THE PLUMBERS WHO’D LOST THEIR HOMES DUE TO THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN.

      We don’t want THEM voting, do we? – post by cburell

• Socialism? No, bailouts are typical – Opinions from The Oregonian Columnists, Editorials, Letters, Blogs, Cartoons and More – OregonLive.com

  In-depth discussion, with historical precedents, of the government’s options in intervening in the market. By the US editor of the Economist.

  tags: economics, economy, usa, europe, history, politics

• LINN WASHINGTON JR: Consider Florida; The Great Vote Fraud Hoax | Capitol Hill Blue

  tags: no_tag

  • Contrary to McCainian claims of major registration fraud, the greatest voter fraud in recent history occurred during the 2000 presidential election where a massive Bush/GOP conspiracy robbed over 50,000 folks in Florida of their right to vote by falsely listing them as felons ineligible to cast ballots. Remembering that George W. Bush won Florida by a mere 534 vote margin in 2000, simple math exposes that GOP disenfranchisement fraud as demonstratively more devastating than some (alleged) fudging on registration forms.

• Op-Ed Columnist – Desperately Seeking Seriousness – NYTimes.com

  tags: no_tag

  • As someone who’s spent a lot of time arguing against conservative economic dogma, I’d like to believe that the bad news convinced many Americans, once and for all, that the right’s economic ideas are wrong and progressive ideas are right. And there’s certainly something to that. These days, with even Alan Greenspan admitting that he was wrong to believe that the financial industry could regulate itself, Reaganesque rhetoric about the magic of the marketplace and the evils of government intervention sounds ridiculous.
  • I suspect that the main reason for the dramatic swing in the polls is something less concrete and more meta than the fact that events have discredited free-market fundamentalism. As the economic scene has darkened, I’d argue, Americans have rediscovered the virtue of seriousness. And this has worked to Mr. Obama’s advantage, because his opponent has run a deeply unserious campaign.

  • In a way, you can’t blame Mr. McCain for campaigning on trivia — after all, it’s worked in the past. Most notably, President Bush got within hanging-chads-and-butterfly-ballot range of the White House only because much of the news media, rather than focusing on the candidates’ policy proposals, focused on their personas: Mr. Bush was an amiable guy you’d like to have a beer with, Al Gore was a stiff know-it-all, and never mind all that hard stuff about taxes and Social Security. And let’s face it: six weeks ago Mr. McCain’s focus on trivia seemed to be paying off handsomely.

    But that was before the prospect of a second Great Depression concentrated the public’s mind.

  • The Obama campaign has hardly been fluff-free — in its early stages it was full of vague uplift. But the Barack Obama voters see now is cool, calm, intellectual and knowledgeable, able to talk coherently about the financial crisis in a way Mr. McCain can’t. And when the world seems to be falling apart, you don’t turn to a guy you’d like to have a beer with, you turn to someone who might actually know how to fix the situation.

    The McCain campaign’s response to its falling chances of victory has been telling: rather than trying to make the case that Mr. McCain really is better qualified to deal with the economic crisis, the campaign has been doing all it can to trivialize things again. Mr. Obama consorts with ’60s radicals! He’s a socialist! He doesn’t love America! Judging from the polls, it doesn’t seem to be working.

    Will the nation’s new demand for seriousness last? Maybe not — remember how 9/11 was supposed to end the focus on trivialities? For now, however, voters seem to be focused on real issues. And that’s bad for Mr. McCain and conservatives in general: right now, to paraphrase Rob Corddry, reality has a clear liberal bias.

• McCain volunteer admits to hoax

  tags: no_tag

  • Once she had told the story to police, “she told lie after lie and the situation compounded to where we are right now,” said Lt. Kraus. He added that Ms. Todd showed no remorse for her actions but was angry with the media, saying they blew the story out of proportion.
  • Mr. Garcia took the widely published picture of Ms. Todd with her injuries. He said he took several photographs with a digital camera to document what had happened. He said he only gave copies of the photos to police and Ms. Todd’s employer, the College Republicans. One photo appeared on The Drudge Report on Thursday, setting off a storm of media attention.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• The Last Lynching: Ted Koppel documentary on Discovery tonight – Boing Boing

  tags: racism, usa, culture, video

• Zakaria: U.S. has itself to blame for financial crisis – CNN.com

  tags: usa, economy, culture, capitalism, history, politics

  • CNN: What do you think caused this crisis?

    Don’t Miss

    • Zakaria’s new book
    • ‘Fareed Zakaria: GPS’

    Zakaria: We did, all of us. Since the 1980s, Americans have consumed more than they produced, and they have made up the difference by borrowing. Not only on the personal consumer level but in how our government runs.

    Every city, every county and every state has wanted to preserve its many and proliferating operations and yet not raise taxes. How to do that? By borrowing, using ever more elaborate financial instruments.

    Easy money plus leverage equals financial crisis.

    CNN: OK. So what do we do now?

    Zakaria: In the short term, all the solutions require that governments take on more debts and larger obligations. This is inevitable and necessary. But that doesn’t mean we should, as some noted economists advocate, stimulate the economy with more tax cuts.

    That would be only one more way to keep the party going artificially, like asking a drunk to go to AA next year but in the meantime to have even more whiskey.

    A far better stimulus would be to announce and expedite major infrastructure and energy projects, which are investments, not consumption, and therefore have a much different effect on the country’s fiscal fortunes.

• supercres.net » Strategy, tactic, or crazy?

  tags: no_tag

  • It should be noted: “Ashley Todd” is an anagram for “Shoddy Tale“.

• Wonkette: The D.C. Gossip » Blog Archive » A Children’s Treasury of Wingnut Reactions to Cut-Nut Ashley Todd Confessing Her Racist Fantasy

  An hilarious (and scary) collection of right-wing reactions to the HOAX exposed.

  The comments thread to this wingnut miscellany is hilarious too. Read it all for a good laugh.

  tags: hoax, elections08, culture, usa, conservative

  • Let us go where we always go during our Times of National Crisis: to the wingnut comments of our nation’s proud conservative blogs. These people were obviously very angry last night about how this Negroid Monster Obama Staffer nearly murdered the brave 20-year-old white gal from Texas who was working the McCain phone banks in Pittsburgh and only wanted to drive around the scary “Little Italy” neighborhood looking for an ATM but instead drove right to the very heart of the Obama movement, which is a crackhouse full of 15-feet-tall Kenyan monsters who hunt this wretched ghetto looking for McCain bumper stickers, so they can lightly scratch their symbol, a backwards letter “B,” on the cheeks of their Twittering victims.

    So, as you maybe heard already, bitchy made it all up. It was just a desperate true believer/campaign worker for McCain/Palin deciding that a race-baiting frenzy might just “turn the corner” for Walnuts. And, now, the wingnuts are a bit disappointed.

• Tony Burman: Shocking Racism at Palin Rally: Al Jazeera Report Starts Controversy

  Interesting. AL JAZEERA ENGLISH CANNOT BE SEEN ON AMERICAN TV.

  Why? (And if you answer, please also tell me if you have watched it – if yes, for how many hours, and what did you think; and if no, why not?)

  David Frost and many other world-class journalists work for it.

  Seems a clear-cut case of AMERICAN PREJUDICE, doesn’t it?

  tags: censorship, capitalism, ideology, media, medialiteracy, democracy

  • It’s true — the way that the U.S. is portrayed on Al Jazeera matters, and we take that responsibility very seriously. We followed up the initial piece by sending the reporter to get reaction from African-American Obama supporters. We gave the last word in this saga to the owner of a PR firm in Atlanta:

    “They are not America. They don’t reflect America, they don’t represent the America that I live in and am a part of, and they don’t reflect the majority of Americans.”

    We will have to wait until November 4 — or the early hours of November 5 — to know who Americans will choose to be their next President. But there are certain things we do know now.

    After the dark and gloomy years of recent times, this race has electrified the world. It’s a U.S. election that has more international resonance that perhaps any in our lifetime.

    And all of these issues have been debated and explored in hundreds of hours of coverage on Al Jazeera English, an award-winning channel that is broadcast in more than 100 countries.

    Except for most of the United States. Political and financial interests have pressured American cable companies from carrying Al Jazeera English.

    In a country that regards itself as the world’s leading democracy, that is regrettable because Al Jazeera’s coverage has been fair, comprehensive and respectful of different points of view. And a window on the world.

    As the world welcomes this new and exciting U.S. era, isn’t it time for Americans — when it comes to being able to see Al Jazeera – to actually be allowed to make their own judgment?

• Huffington Post Still Blowing Doors Off – Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • 
    • Interesting to see the rates of growth of these blogs over 12 months ago. TPM must be doing something right!

      And NOTE: This is a GOOD, BI-PARTISAN LIST OF POLITICAL BLOGS for the CLASSROOM. – post by cburell

• Palin Popularity Plummets as Controversy Drags on McCain Ticket

  This article is most interesting in its breakdown of the voter out-reach strategies, demographically, of the two campaigns. Obama has more money, which is obviously helpful, but he also seems to have a more sophisticated game plan. Campaign management must be intensely interesting, like coaching a football team. The playbook angle.

  tags: elections08

• InternetNews Realtime IT News – Ohio Election Site Back up Amid Fraud Fights

  Real politics in Ohio. At stake: 200,000 votes in one district alone.

  tags: elections08, democracy

• Scott Swenson: (Watch) Brian Williams Ask McCain-Palin if Abortion Clinic Bombers are Terrorists Like Ayers – Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • NBC’s Brian Williams asked Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin about their attacks on Sen. Barack Obama and his association with Bill Ayers, and if they would define abortion clinic bombers as domestic terrorists.

    Palin said she wouldn’t condone such actions and ultimately worked her way to saying that “terrorist” would be defined as anyone who seeks to destroy innocent Americans, meaning that she seems to agree that abortion clinic bombers are terrorists. McCain felt the need to to clean up the answer later in the interview saying that anyone who breaks the law, including bombing an abortion clinic, should be punished to the full extent of the law.

    • Good for Brian Williams for asking the obvious. – post by cburell
  • McCain has previously said he was “proud of everyone attending our rallies” which includes Paul Schenck who has been linked to numerous acts of violence, including the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian. Former Republican Congressman and host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe has regularly suggested the media discuss Ayers more, but has yet to raise the McCain-Palin links to these un-repetent domestic terrorists. Schenck was recently given VIP passes to a McCain-Palin rally.
    • NOTEWORTHY. If Obama’s campaign knew this, that means they truly creditied the electorate with being able to take the high road with him, while the McCain campaign made a mockery of itself by flogging the Ayers story.

      And they were right. The electorate is wonderfully above negative campaigning this election, overall. – post by cburell

  • Later in the interview in a discussion of elites, McCain defines an elite as someone who “thinks they can dictate to America what they believe, instead of letting Americans decide for themselves.” That seems to make the McCain-Palin views on a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions, “elitist”.
    • The logic of this ticket is as shootable as fish nailed to the wall at point blank range, but this is still a GOOD POINT. – post by cburell

  • In the same interview Palin was asked if she is a feminist, and again dodged the question preferring not to associate herself with “labels” even though she is a member of Feminists for Life.

    
     

• McCain camp defends Palin in wardrobe flap | Politics | Reuters

  Classic Red Herring: We screwed up, but the media is the real problem.

  tags: elections08, politics, rhetoric

  • Wallace said the media storm about Palin’s wardrobe was a terrible disservice to her and said there seemed to be a “double-standard for women in politics.”

    “That any aspect of her shoes, clothes or appearance has become a distraction is a terrible commentary on the state of the media and politics. Let’s get on with our great debate about the best direction for the country in these challenging times for our economy and our nation’s security,” she said.

• How Safe Is This Election? | Election 2008 | AlterNet

  EXCELLENT, in-depth analysis of all the ways that democracy can be sabotaged through modern vote suppression in America.

  GREAT CLASSROOM RESOURCE.

  tags: democracy, elections08, history, usa

  • Some Republican-run states, most notably Florida, have introduced absurdly strict standards for the admission of new voters to the rolls, making it likely that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of them will have to go to extraordinary lengths on election day to prove that they have the right to cast a ballot. History suggests many of these new voters will either give up when challenged or fail to show up at all.

• Tweets Give Race-Baiting Hoaxster a ‘B’ for Effort | Threat Level from Wired.com

  Too funny. Hoax campaign girl getting hash-tag twitter grief.

  tags: elections08, hoax

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

A reader last week mentioned this “Wordling Political Speeches” as a NYTimes lesson plan, so I Wordled McCain’s stump speech in Colorado this week.

I thought I’d have fun with it by turning it into an open thread for readers to play with.

Here are the rules:

Write your own caption in the comment thread, based only on words in the image (click image for larger view). I’ll select the winner and add the caption, with credit, in a couple days.

Example:

“Applause: McCain people going Obama.”

There are zingers galore in here, but I hope you’ll have fun with them, so I’ll leave the pickings to you. Please lighten your day and ours with a laugh.

[Update: And the winner is: one very creative Vincent Robleto, whose Kerblotto blog screams "Subscribe" for its verbal and graphic wit and creativity. Really, check it out. (And Vince, I can only imagine how honored you must feel, considering the vast field of competition you edged out for this award. ) Thanks for playing to both you, Diane, and the thousands of others!]

• kdka.com – McCain Campaign Worker Confessed To Making Up Story Of Attack

  BAM. Can things get any worse for the GOP?

  It will be interesting to read the comment threads full of racist anger over this “assault,” with nary a hint of skepticism. Will there be any reflection?

  tags: hoax, mccain, elections08

  • A Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Ashley Todd confessed to making up the story & is facing charges

    PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ―

    Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter “B” in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

    Ashley Todd, 20, of Texas, initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car.

• The Busman’s Holiday: UPDATE 3 — Questions Raised About McCain Volunteer’s Alleged Knife Mutilation

  EXCELLENT example of CITIZEN JOURNALISM: this blogspot blogger used Google Maps to embed images of the site of the crime, got comments from people familiar with the crime scene, and linked to updates that add more evidence this is a WILLIE HORTON-style deception.

  tags: hoax, mccain, elections08

• Ashley Todd Photo: ATM Video Proves Assault Lies Hoax? – Original News: The Post Chronicle

  The B, backward _or_ forward, is _not_ something an “angry big black assailant” would carve in somebody’s face WITH A KNIFE. There is not a single knife-slice on her cheek. The B looks _rubbed_.

  And rubbing takes a longer time to do, and hurts less, than using the knife to cut.

  The sad thing? I”ve seen many comments believe this hoax _without question_ – which means, as usual, _without thinking_.

  tags: elections08, racism, hoax, mccain, democracy, usa

  • 

• Police say inconsistencies in McCain staffer’s story

  If this 20-year-old McCain volunteer from Texas is lying about this, serious charges should be brought against her. She’s doing it in a battleground state, first of all.

  Second of all, many reporters are reporting her _allegations_ as _facts_, despite the lack of corroboration. And many people are reacting with “white rage” in the comments to those reports.

  Her TWITTER page is a key piece of evidence, btw.

  tags: democracy, elections08, hoax, conservative, mccain

  • Police say there are inconsistencies in the story of a McCain campaign staffer who told them she was mugged in Bloomfield on Wednesday night by a man who etched a “B” on her cheek when he saw a McCain sticker on her car.

    Ashley Todd, 20, of College Station, Texas, spent five hours with robbery detectives last night at police headquarters, where she took a polygraph test. She told police that a man robbed her as she tried to take money from an ATM machine at Pearl Street and Liberty Avenue around 9 p.m. Wednesday.

    Ms. Todd told police she then began walking to her car, which had McCain stickers on it. She told police that although the robber had moved away from her, he became agitated when he saw her car, punched her in the back of the head, pushed her to the ground and carved the letter into her face. Yesterday, she said the man sexually assaulted her, a detail that police said she didn’t mention in the initial report.

    Police today said that security camera footage from the Citizens Bank doesn’t show the incident, but it could have happened outside the camera’s range. Police also said they have found no witnesses to the attack.

• Teaching “controversial” topics | Get Schooled – Annotated

  If a kid cries in a Psychology class because it disagrees with her belief in Astrology as an explanation of human behavior, should we “teach _that_ controversy” too?

  Prayer didn’t work during the Bubonic Plague as well as Science would have. Why do religious people insist on resisting Science? Why do schools let them?

  It kills me that the most powerful and influential nation on the planet is among the most extreme in this respect.

  How can Americans go through 12 years of basic education, and exit without a _basic_ understanding science and its method?

  tags: science, evolution, usa, religion, creationism, culture, christianity

  • I spent Thursday at Emory University attending a workshop on teaching evolution. Every high school biology teacher is required to teach evolution, but the topic has faced challenges.

    Back in 2004, State schools Superintendent Kathy Cox proposed striking references to evolution and other related concepts from the state curriculum. She changed her mind after a public backlash.

    Cobb County schools faced its own battles over placing stickers in textbooks questioning evolution.

    At the Emory conference teachers shared stories about students crying in class when the evolution unit started. Others said some students received training on what questions they could ask to challenge and disrupt the lessons. A few admitted they dread the unit because of the number of complaints they get from parents and others in the community.

    I don’t want us to get into a debate over evolution vs. creationism vs. intelligent design. Instead, I’m curious as to what teachers and schools do with lessons considered controversial.

    For example, do you send notes home to give parents a heads-up? Do you address the controversy with students in class or do you go about your lessons like it’s any other activity?

    Is there a way to remove the controversy – whether real or perceived – from our classrooms?

    • Why not simply say, “Evolution is science, and as ‘true’ as Gravitation. Creationism and I.D. are not. End of discussion.” ? – post by cburell

• McCain’s Warning on Voter Fraud Gets Details Wrong: Ann Woolner

  ACORN is a red herring. Here’s what really threatens democracy (although it doesn’t mention the DIEBOLD and other electronic voting machines).

  tags: elections08, democracy, usa

  • Phantom Voters

    The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now,
    or ACORN, has a nasty habit of hiring day workers who register
    thousands of phantom voters, often in swing states. ACORN denies
    responsibility, insisting it culls for bogus names, fires whoever
    turned them in and flags any irregularities to authorities.

    If you doubt ACORN’s story and worry that fake registrations
    can lead to false voting, I don’t blame you. But you will
    probably strike out if you try to find phony votes that were
    actually cast. Officials verify registrations before accepting
    them.

    Whatever you make of ACORN, don’t let its misdeeds blind you
    to the rest of the picture.

    Consider Nathan Sproul, former Republican Party chief for
    Arizona, who ran a multistate voter drive in 2004. Some of his
    former employees have told reporters that his group destroyed
    registration forms filled out by Democrats, fired canvassers who
    turned them in and submitted to state authorities only the
    registrations of those who said they were Republicans. Sproul
    denied the allegations.

    Oregon Probe

    An Oregon investigation into Sproul’s 2004 operation there
    confirmed “instances of wrongdoing” but found insufficient
    evidence to prosecute, according to the state’s Justice
    Department.

    Bad as it is to submit fake registrations, no harm is done
    unless one of those made-up registrants gets approved by the
    state and then shows up at the polls and votes.

    “Keep in mind with these stories about potentially bad
    registrations, they don’t equal bad votes,” says Terri Enns, a
    senior fellow at Election Law @ Moritz, out of Ohio State
    University.

    But if you register voters and then shred their registration
    forms because they support the wrong candidate, you rob
    legitimate voters of their ballots in an attempt to tilt the
    election result.

    Ancient history, you say? This year Sproul has a new group
    which the Republican Party and the McCain campaign have hired for
    voter drives.

• John McCain Implodes: Dead Cat Bounces, Making Excuses & Uppity Negro Voters

  tags: mccain

  • The excuses for McCain’s great unraveling are flying fast and furious, and most of them lead back to Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, his tone-deaf campaign managers, because of their obsession with tactics over substance, notably Schmidt’s snap selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate without even a cursory examination of who she was.

    If McCain has been in the thrall of his handlers, then he is even more befuddled than I have feared. If that is false, then McCain is even less prepared for that 3 a.m. phone call than I have feared.

    Pick one. Nah, go ahead and pick both, kind of like McCain having more than one position on so many issues.

    Yes, it’s that bad.

• Freddie Mac Money Trail Catches Up With McCain | Newsweek Periscope | Newsweek.com

  Rick Davis again.

  tags: elections08, mccain

  • Few advisers in John McCain’s inner circle inspire more loyalty from him than campaign manager Rick Davis. McCain and his wife, Cindy, credit the shrewd, and sometimes volatile, Republican insider with rescuing the campaign last year when it was out of money and on the verge of collapse. As a result, McCain has always defended him—even when faced with tough questions about the foreign lobbying clients of Davis’s high-powered consulting firm. “Rick is a friend, and I trust him,” McCain told NEWSWEEK last year.

    Last week, though, McCain’s trust in Davis was tested again amid disclosures that Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant that was recently placed under federal conservatorship, paid his campaign manager’s firm $15,000 a month between 2006 and August 2008.

• The punditocracy’s Seven Biggest Blunders of the 2008 election | Salon News – Annotated

  A great review of how wrong the media bobble-heads are when they play expert on teevee.

  tags: media, politics, democracy, elections08

  • But that’s Conventional Wisdom for you. Often wrong, but never in doubt.
    • God, I wish I’d written that line. – post by cburell

• Blame game: GOP forms circular firing squad – Politico.com Print View

  Great title for a devastating article. Epic disarray in the McCain campaign team.

  tags: mccain, elections08

• Leslie Harris: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Try To Fix It

  Webheads and techies who think politics are unimportant should read this series.

  tags: web2.0, technology, education, privacy, elections08, democracy, politics

  • [The Internet is at a crossroads. Down one path lies a future where digital technology enhances constitutional freedoms; spurs innovations in expression and entrepreneurship; and fulfills its ultimate promise of connecting and empowering the world. Down the other? A future where the Internet is turned against users; where government spying runs unchecked, and where innovation is stifled by a closed and locked system, controlled by a handful of entrenched players. The next president will play a key role in determining which path we take. This is the fourth in a series of entries over the next couple weeks about the critical technology and civil liberties choices facing the next president of the United States. You can read more on our complete transition guide for next president.]

• Edward Lifson: Studs (Terkel) for Obama

  Terkel is still amazing, after all these years. He gives Obama advice I hope is heard, and faults Obama for not being Progressive ENOUGH.

  tags: obama, elections08

• Michelle Malkin » Why that McCain volunteer’s “mutilation” story smells awfully weird; Update: Police to administer polygraph; conflicting evidence at scene

  When even the venomous Michelle Malkin says Obama supporters are innocent, surely you’ll believe it.

  Like me, she smelled a fish in the “WILLIE HORTON PLOY” of the Texas girl “MUTILATED” by a “6′4″ BLACK MAN” in Philadelphia yesterday.

  Really interesting role of Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter here – along with Drudge Report wearing egg on the face for swallowing this one, and fellow traveller Malkin calling him on it.

  The nice thing is the circus, thanks to netizens, seems to be over before the media had a chance to run too far with this HOAX.

  tags: mccain

  • Scroll down for updates…”Police planned to administer a polygraph test to Ashley Todd, 20, because her statements about the attack conflict with evidence from the Citizens Bank ATM where she claims the incident occurred, police said”…and more below on following her MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook trails…

• Does McCain think America is too ignorant to know theft? – Annotated

  Good facts to refute the silly (but still effective) “SOCIALIST” label the desperate McCain/Schmidt/Davis camp is throwing at Obama, and which the least intelligent are parroting.

  Since these people don’t seem to read basic facts, maybe you can read the following from the Congressional Budget Office to them:

  tags: taxes, elections08, economy, mccain, bush

  • Is John McCain stupid, or does he believe we are? That’s the question as he criticizes Barack Obama for allegedly trying to “redistribute the wealth” with a plan to lower taxes on the middle class and raise them on the super-rich.

  • I’m guessing the latter, because the evidence is so overwhelming.

    In the last eight years, we the little people have been forced to provide more and more of the taxes fueling America’s redistribution machine. As the Congressional Budget Office reports, the $715 billion in tax breaks that President Bush gave to those making more than $342,000 a year began dramatically shifting the overall tax burden from the rich onto the rest of us. Meanwhile, because of lobbyist-crafted loopholes, most corporations pay zero federal income taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office. The result is what Warren Buffett admits: When counting all taxes (income, payroll, property, etc.), billionaires and Big Business often pay lower effective tax rates than their employees.

    The output of the redistribution machine is becoming just as regressive. In the age of Halliburton fraud and ExxonMobil subsidies, our government spends $93 billion a year on corporate welfare. (For comparison, that’s roughly three times what it spends on a traditional welfare program such as food stamps.) That doesn’t include the recent bailout giving $700 billion to the same banks doling out $70 billion in executive pay and bonuses – a scheme the Financial Times says “amounts to a large transfer of resources from lower to higher income earners.”

    Thanks to these redistributive policies – policies McCain championed in Congress – the richest 1 percent today owns a larger share of America’s wealth than at any time since before the Great Depression.

    The Republican standard-bearer likely knows all this, but his fetish is fact-free fairy tales – the kind presenting seven houses, a beer-industry fortune and lockstep conservatism as mavericky Joe-the-Plumber populism. When it comes to economics, McCain is banking on Americans believing similarly inane myths – specifically, those portraying obscene affluence as the commonplace achievement under royalist rule.

    • –the rest is worth a read. – post by cburell

• Spending rose in Palin’s Alaska administrations – USATODAY.com

  Oh, those pesky facts. So much for “Palin the reformer and fiscal conservative.”

  tags: palin, elections08, economy, usa, mccain

  • WASHINGTON — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin calls herself a fiscal conservative who wants to “rein in government spending.” She says she “reformed the abuses of earmarks in our state.” Republican John McCain said during the last debate that his running mate has “cut the size of government.”

    But Palin didn’t cut the size of government as mayor of Wasilla, and she hasn’t done so as Alaska’s governor, city and state budget records show. Spending in fast-growing Wasilla increased by 55% during her tenure from 1996-2002, records show. In nearly two years as governor, she has presided over a 31% spending hike by a state government that sought earmarks from Washington even as it reaped billions from higher oil prices and Palin-backed tax increases on oil companies.

• Jeffrey Feldman: Drudge Puts Dangerous Spin on Mugging, Implies Violence Targeting McCain Volunteers

  A GREAT ARTICLE FOR CLASSROOM USE about HOW HEADLINES, FRAMES, AND OMISSIONS OF FACTS CAN CHANGE A NEWS STORY.

  This is dangerous stuff.

  tags: elections08, media, journalism, rhetoric, democracy, propaganda

• Will Ferrell Back As Bush With Tina Fey’s Palin On Thursday’s “Saturday Night Live” (VIDEO)

  Hilarious and smart. So good to see Will Farrell doing Dubya again.

  tags: elections08, humor, bush, palin, mccain, video

• E. J. Dionne Jr. – Civil War on the Right – washingtonpost.com – Annotated

  This really is one of the most interesting, and most potentially historical, side-stories of the election: the possible fall of the GOP and rise of an INTELLECTUAL conservative party to take its place.

  tags: elections08, mccain, palin, conservative, history, usa, democracy, politics

  • Conservatives are at each other’s throats, and here’s what’s revealing about how divided they are: The critics of John McCain and the critics of Sarah Palin represent entirely different camps.
  • Then there are those conservatives who see Palin as a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party” (David Brooks), as someone who “doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin” (Kathleen Parker), as “a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics” (Peggy Noonan).

  • For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

    The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

    • I’ve been noting this all week. The originally intellectual Conservative movement has campaigned itself over the decades into an anti-intellectual party. The crows have come home to roost.

      It would be nice to see a new party of philoophical, not brand-name, conservatism replace the GOP. Those debates can only enrich the political discourse by debating the liberal point of view, instead of demonizing it. – post by cburell

  • Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as “Joe the Plumber” often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.

    It isn’t working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.

    • We can only hope.

      But schools have apparently done a horrible job of teaching blue-collar white people to think clearly enough to see through demagoguery and propaganda. I fully expect millions of white Americans to vote against their own interests because of their trust in FOX. – post by cburell

  • Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as “Joe the Plumber” often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.

    It isn’t working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.

    postchat@aol.com

• Op-Ed Columnist – Rebranding the U.S. With Obama – NYTimes.com – Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race:

  • She: Obama? But he’s the black man, isn’t he?

    Me: Yes, exactly.

    She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States?

    Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected.

    She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers.

    Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.

    She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?

    Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him.

    [Long pause.]

    She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!

    We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s.

  • Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Mr. Obama’s rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States. Remember that the one thing countless millions of people around the world “know” about the United States is that it is controlled by a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police with fire hoses to repress blacks. To them, Mr. Obama’s rise triggers severe cognitive dissonance.

    “It’s an anomaly, so contrary to their expectation that it makes them receptive to a new paradigm for the U.S.,” Mr. Kull said.

    Europeans like to mock the vapidity of American politics, but they also acknowledge that it would be difficult to imagine a brown or black person leading France or Germany.

  • As for Africa, Mr. Obama’s Kenyan father was of the Luo tribe, a minority that has long suffered brutal discrimination in both Kenya and in Uganda (where it is known as the Acholi). The bitter joke in East Africa is that a Luo has more of a chance of becoming president in the United States than in Kenya.

  • Yet before we get too far with the self-congratulations, it’s worth remembering something else.

    In the western industrialized world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica’s 95 percent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade.

    Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don’t forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president.

    • Wonderful reality-check on the fact that other countries are better at religious and racial tolerance than the USA. – post by cburell

  • Look, Mr. Obama’s skin color is a bad reason to vote for him or against him. Substance should always trump symbolism.

    Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America’s global influence — and thus to achieve some of our international objectives — in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person’s epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we’re every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago.

    • Well-said. Brains, not race, should decide our vote.

      Race is no reason to vote for a candidate. BUT IT’S ALSO NO REASON NOT TO. – post by cburell

• McCain, the stalwart, gets my vote Nov. 4 | ajc.com

  Two words Krauthammer fails to mention in his ode to McCain: SARAH PALIN.

  Next.

  tags: mccain

  • McCain, the stalwart, gets my vote Nov. 4

• Salon.com Books | Stephen King’s God trip – Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • Beyond the pop culture feast, at the novel’s heart resides a much older myth, our founding myth, you might say, the tale of a manifest destiny, steeped in Jesus and gone horribly wrong. In the age of the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, faced with the prospect of another Great Depression, I can’t think of a more relevant fantasy with which to chase away — or embrace — the gloom.
  • I just finished reading a book called “Nixonland,” and the parallels to the Nixon campaigns and McCain campaigns are just depressing. He’s doing a lot of events that are supposed to be populist but are in reality completely managed. He’s got a vice president who’s Joe Six-Pack. The parallels just go on and on. You’ve got the unpopular war, economic problems, gasoline problems. Whatever goes around, comes around. “The Stand” even says that. Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

  • Questions of politics are never very far away in “The Stand.” Once the plague has come and gone, society has to be reformed. Do you think of it as a political novel, in any sense?

    I did see it that way. I’ve always been a political novelist, and those things have always interested me. “Firestarter” is a political novel. “The Dead Zone” is a political novel. There’s that scene in “The Dead Zone” where Johnny Smith sees Greg Stillson in the future starting a nuclear war. Around my house we kinda laugh when Sarah Palin comes on TV, and we say, “That’s Greg Stillson as a woman.”

  • I was the guy who wrote best-selling books who had also marched in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. I brought that sensibility first, whether it was foremost in my mind first. A lot of people reacted to that, the idea that here was somebody who was writing about pop music that they knew, for instance.

    Earlier in my career, I was just excoriated by the critics. I was just drubbed unmercifully, and I think I got more of it because the books were successful, and they were just horrified because they sensed it was something that was working in the popular context. It was different than what had gone before. And the thing they settled on was all the brand names. There was review after review that said this can’t be up to anything serious because it’s so ephemeral, because he’s talking about Excedrin, he’s talking about Prestone antifreeze, whatever it was. What they never took into consideration was that there was a whole generation, a huge generation, suckled on television.

  • What did you learn while writing “The Stand”?

    I wrote the book in Colorado for the most part, and at that time, there was a lot of discussion on the news, and on local TV stations about chemical dumps and chemical weapons in Nevada, and so that played a constant background in my thoughts while I was writing it, and at the same time, that’s the edge of the Bible Belt, and there were a lot of radio preachers, and one night I heard this guy raving about once in every generation, a plague will fall among them, and I started to think about that dichotomy between the spiritual and the technological, and that became the great subject of the book.

  • In the introduction to the expanded edition of “The Stand,” you also called the novel a work of “dark Christianity.” What did you mean by that?

    I was raised Christian, and I was raised to believe in the idea of the Antichrist. My wife said that — she was raised a Catholic — the attitude of the Catholic Church is, give them to me when they’re young, and they’ll be mine forever. It isn’t really true. A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

    I’m interested in the concepts. I’m particularly interested in the idea that in the New Testament, you’re suggesting a moral code that’s actually enlightened. Basically what Christ preached: get along with your neighbor and give everything away and follow me. So we’re talking pretty much about communism or socialism, all the things that the good Christian Republicans in the House of Representatives today are railing about in light of this bailout bill.

    • Oh, the anti-Chrstian capitalist Church-goers. Good for you, King.

      As Max von Sydow says in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “If Jesus were to come back to America today, he would vomit over what’s being said and done in his name.” – post by cburell

  • I was able to use all those things in “The Stand.” It’s an effort to say, let’s give God his due here. Too often, in novels that are speculative, God is a kind of kryptonite, and that’s about all that it is, and it goes back to Dracula, where someone dumps a crucifix in Count Dracula’s face, and he pulls away and runs back into his house. That’s not religion. That’s some kind of juju, like a talisman. I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to explore what that means to be able to rise above adversity by faith, because it’s something most of us do every day. We may not call it Christianity. I wanted to do that. I wanted it to be a God trip.

  • Running throughout your body of work, there is this thread, a running internal argument about God. I’m thinking, in particular, of the story “Ayana” in the new collection.

    It’s a mystery. That’s the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it’s mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously. I understand where Bill Maher is coming from when he says, basically, the world is destroying itself over a bunch of fairy tales about talking snakes and men who are alive inside fishes. I’m very sympathetic to it, but at the same time, given the cosmos that we’re living in, it’s very persuasive, the idea that there is some kind of first cause that’s running things. It might not be the god of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, it might not be the god of al-Qaida, and it might not be the god of Abraham, but something very well could be running things. The order of the universe as we see it, the interlocking nature, and the way things work together, are persuasive of the idea that there may be some overarching first cause.

    The other thing that’s interested me ever since I was a kid was the idea that’s baldly articulated in “Desperation,” and that is that God is cruel. I always in my mind equated Mother Abigail with Moses, and the story of Moses taking credit for the water coming from the rock and being forbidden to get to the Promised Land because of that one thing, that one slip, where God is cruel, and I wanted to use those things and say two things. First, that the myths are difficult and suggest a difficult moral path through life, and second, that they are ultimately more fruitful and more earth-friendly than the god of technology, the god of the microchip, the god of the cellphone.

    • Interesting. – post by cburell

  • A personal question about the apocalypse. If you had to handicap which major catastrophe will take down human civilization in your lifetime, where would you put your money?

    Nuclear weapons. No doubt about it. There are days when I get up and say, I cannot believe, I cannot fucking believe that it’s been more than 50 years since one of those things got popped on an actual population. There are too many out there. One will get away, or someone will make one from spare parts and put it in a knapsack or blow it in Bombay or New York or San Francisco.

• McCain volunteer claims attacker cut ‘B’ into face | AP Texas News | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle – Annotated

  We have to ask if this is a Willie Horton variation. See below for the annotations of the fishy details.

  tags: elections08, racism, mccain, obama

  • PITTSBURGH
    — A campaign volunteer for John McCain told police she was robbed at knifepoint at an ATM and knocked down by a man who then carved a “B” in her face after noticing a sticker for the presidential candidate on her car.
    • Question 1: CNN also covered this story, and said “after noticing the McCain bumper sticker on her car, the thief _punched her in back of the head._”

      This implies the assailant was _behind_ the Texas girl, since he punched her from behind. So: HOW COULD SHE KNOW HE “NOTICED HER BUMPER STICKER”?

      Did he preface his punch to the back of her head with a narrative statement – “Excuse me, miss, but I notice a McCain bumper sticker on your car.” – BAM.

      For that matter, how did he know the alleged car was hers?

      We don’t have details so far. – post by cburell

  • Police said the woman, 20-year-old Ashley Todd of College Station, Texas, refused medical attention.
    • Why would she refuse medical attention? – post by cburell
  • Todd told police she was withdrawing money just before 9 p.m. Wednesday when a man approached her from behind, put a knife to her neck and demanded money, police said. She said she gave him $60.
    • Okay, I live in Asia, where stuff like this doesn’t happen often at all.

      So is a 9pm attack on a city street so easy to believe in Pittsburgh? – post by cburell

  • The robber then noticed the bumper sticker, punched her in the back of the head, knocked her down and used the knife to carve a “B” on the right side of her face, the woman told police.
    • See question 1. – post by cburell
  • It was unclear what the “B” was meant to symbolize, Richard said.
    • CNN adds: “Richard said the woman described her alleged attacker as a dark-skinned African-American, 6 feet 4 inches tall with a medium build and short dark hair, wearing dark clothing and shiny shoes.”

      Hello, Willie Horton. A tall one, at that. Big black man – perfect. – post by cburell

    • But we’re all supposed to infer “Barack,” surely?

      Or “Bigot”? – post by cburell

  • McCain spokesman Peter Feldman confirmed that the woman is a campaign volunteer but declined to comment further.
    • What will the investigation of this woman reveal about her background? Here the whole DIGITAL FOOTPRINT angle becomes fascinating. She’s going to be so scrutinized. – post by cburell
  • The Republican candidate and his running mate, Sarah Palin, called Todd on Thursday afternoon to express their concern, the campaign confirmed.
    • So McCain and Palin decide with this call to connect their campaign with what, if true, is a street crime, and make it a campaign issue.

      Now they’ve got a red herring to bring up when people mention the “kill him,” “traitor,” “Muslim,” “socialist,” “off with his head,” “Arab,” and other comments coming out of their supporters’ mouths at rallies. – post by cburell

  • Police said no police photo had been taken of the woman Wednesday, but by Thursday afternoon a purported picture of a woman with a “B” scratched into her cheek was circulating on the Internet.
    • So the police take no photo, but a photo is circulating on the internet.

      Then who took the photo? Why didn’t the police take one? Who decided to put it on the internet? Why?

      And why was the “B” scratched backwards? – post by cburell

• Editorial – Barack Obama – Editorial Board – Endorsement – NYTimes.com – Annotated

  A fine analysis of the issues, how the candidates compare on them, and an evaluation of them.

  I usually hated teaching editorial writing to high school classrooms, because either the subjects were lame – freaking school uniforms – or the kids were too dumb to know about real-world issues (which is the usually the fault of schools, which don’t require them to know about current events, and thus looses a herd of ignoramus graduates into the adult world annually).

  Editorials like this and so many other this election year, though (and ESQUIRE MAGAZINE’S is my favorite so far), remind us what a noble form the editorial can be.

  tags: obama, elections08

  • In the same time, Senator John McCain of Arizona has retreated farther and farther to the fringe of American politics, running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism. His policies and worldview are mired in the past. His choice of a running mate so evidently unfit for the office was a final act of opportunism and bad judgment that eclipsed the accomplishments of 26 years in Congress.

    Given the particularly ugly nature of Mr. McCain’s campaign, the urge to choose on the basis of raw emotion is strong. But there is a greater value in looking closely at the facts of life in America today and at the prescriptions the candidates offer. The differences are profound.

    Mr. McCain offers more of the Republican every-man-for-himself ideology, now lying in shards on Wall Street and in Americans’ bank accounts. Mr. Obama has another vision of government’s role and responsibilities.

    • Nice metaphor in that last paragraph. – post by cburell

  • In his convention speech in Denver, Mr. Obama said, “Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”

    Since the financial crisis, he has correctly identified the abject failure of government regulation that has brought the markets to the brink of collapse.

    • No, no, no. He’s a socialist. We need to trust Wall Street and the Free Market to correct themselves and save us all. – post by cburell

  • The Economy

    The American financial system is the victim of decades of Republican deregulatory and anti-tax policies. Those ideas have been proved wrong at an unfathomable price, but Mr. McCain — a self-proclaimed “foot soldier in the Reagan revolution” — is still a believer.

    Mr. Obama sees that far-reaching reforms will be needed to protect Americans and American business.

    Mr. McCain talks about reform a lot, but his vision is pinched. His answer to any economic question is to eliminate pork-barrel spending — about $18 billion in a $3 trillion budget — cut taxes and wait for unfettered markets to solve the problem.

    Mr. Obama is clear that the nation’s tax structure must be changed to make it fairer. That means the well-off Americans who have benefited disproportionately from Mr. Bush’s tax cuts will have to pay some more. Working Americans, who have seen their standard of living fall and their children’s options narrow, will benefit. Mr. Obama wants to raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation, restore a climate in which workers are able to organize unions if they wish and expand educational opportunities.

    Mr. McCain, who once opposed President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy as fiscally irresponsible, now wants to make them permanent. And while he talks about keeping taxes low for everyone, his proposed cuts would overwhelmingly benefit the top 1 percent of Americans while digging the country into a deeper fiscal hole.

    • Please, Joe the (non-)Plumber fans, read that last paragraph. Don’t be taken by the promises of the plutocrats. – post by cburell
  • Mr. Obama would have a learning curve on foreign affairs, but he has already showed sounder judgment than his opponent on these critical issues. His choice of Senator Joseph Biden — who has deep foreign-policy expertise — as his running mate is another sign of that sound judgment. Mr. McCain’s long interest in foreign policy and the many dangers this country now faces make his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska more irresponsible.
    • I disagree. McCain knows that if his 72-year-old body gave out, THERE IS NO PERSON MORE FIT TO ASSUME THE PRESIDENCY AND LEAD THE WORLD THAN SARAH PALIN.

      I trust John McCain’s honor. He chose her because he knew it was right for America.

      (If you are irony-deaf, please ask a friend whether I mean this.) – post by cburell

  • Both presidential candidates talk about strengthening alliances in Europe and Asia, including NATO, and strongly support Israel. Both candidates talk about repairing America’s image in the world. But it seems clear to us that Mr. Obama is far more likely to do that — and not just because the first black president would present a new American face to the world.

    Mr. Obama wants to reform the United Nations, while Mr. McCain wants to create a new entity, the League of Democracies — a move that would incite even fiercer anti-American furies around the world.

    Unfortunately, Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, sees the world as divided into friends (like Georgia) and adversaries (like Russia). He proposed kicking Russia out of the Group of 8 industrialized nations even before the invasion of Georgia. We have no sympathy for Moscow’s bullying, but we also have no desire to replay the cold war. The United States must find a way to constrain the Russians’ worst impulses, while preserving the ability to work with them on arms control and other vital initiatives.

    Both candidates talk tough on terrorism, and neither has ruled out military action to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But Mr. Obama has called for a serious effort to try to wean Tehran from its nuclear ambitions with more credible diplomatic overtures and tougher sanctions. Mr. McCain’s willingness to joke about bombing Iran was frightening.

  • The Constitution and the Rule of Law

    Under Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the justice system and the separation of powers have come under relentless attack. Mr. Bush chose to exploit the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, the moment in which he looked like the president of a unified nation, to try to place himself above the law.

    • And shame on you, New York Times, for betraying your duty to democracy by withholding information that would have exposed Bush’s lies until after the 2004 elections.

      This would be a good place for you to endorse a change in your own lowered standards of jouranalistic integrity as well. – post by cburell

  • The next president will have the chance to appoint one or more justices to a Supreme Court that is on the brink of being dominated by a radical right wing. Mr. Obama may appoint less liberal judges than some of his followers might like, but Mr. McCain is certain to pick rigid ideologues. He has said he would never appoint a judge who believes in women’s reproductive rights.
    • I disagree. Back-room abortions are good for America. More pregnant teens due to abstinence-only sex education is good for America too.

      And if we’re really lucky, McCain/Palin will appoint judges who favor the teaching of the book of Genesis as a science textbook. Fossils and genetics are just tricks of Satan. – post by cburell

  • Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians.

    He surrendered his standing as an independent thinker in his rush to embrace Mr. Bush’s misbegotten tax policies and to abandon his leadership position on climate change and immigration reform.

    Mr. McCain could have seized the high ground on energy and the environment. Earlier in his career, he offered the first plausible bill to control America’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Now his positions are a caricature of that record: think Ms. Palin leading chants of “drill, baby, drill.”

    • McCain, seriously, must be saddened to realize what he’s done to his reputation for posterity – and all for a cynical cause that lost anyway. – post by cburell

  • Mr. Obama has withstood some of the toughest campaign attacks ever mounted against a candidate. He’s been called un-American and accused of hiding a secret Islamic faith. The Republicans have linked him to domestic terrorists and questioned his wife’s love of her country. Ms. Palin has also questioned millions of Americans’ patriotism, calling Republican-leaning states “pro-America.”

    This politics of fear, division and character assassination helped Mr. Bush drive Mr. McCain from the 2000 Republican primaries and defeat Senator John Kerry in 2004. It has been the dominant theme of his failed presidency.

    • Deservedly scathing.

      Will anybody hire Bush/McCain/Palin’s campaign team in future elections? Let’s hope this is end of days for Rick Davis and company. – post by cburell

  • The nation’s problems are simply too grave to be reduced to slashing “robo-calls” and negative ads. This country needs sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership and strong leadership. Barack Obama has shown that he has all of those qualities.
    • –the end.

      So why do I fear the election might still go to McCain/Palin? – post by cburell

• Polls Show Obama Gaining Among Bush Voters – NYTimes.com

  I’ve been thinking about PRAYER more lately. While it still seems as effective as throwing a message in a bottle into the sea, I’ll do it in asking Whatever Is Out There to save the 21st century from DOOM due to the SWING VOTES OF BIGOTS.

  God save us all if Americans vote based on a COLOR instead of a BRAIN.

  And the funny thing? It seems the CHURCHGOERS – a certain type, anyway – are the ones most likely to be the RACISTS. Don’t you see that too? Mainly poor, uneducated white people.

  I’m on my knees, Jesus. Tell them AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE GOD’S CHILDREN TOO.

  tags: obama, racism, elections08

  • Of potential concern for Mr. Obama’s strategists, however, a third of voters surveyed say they know someone who does not support Mr. Obama because he is black.

• Elana Schor: Sarah Palin won’t be the Republican nominee in 2012 | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

  A laundry list of reasons Palin 2012 is not as realistic as the pundits make it sound. Nice analysis. Possibly because it’s from the UK instead of the FOX or CNN.

  tags: palin, elections08

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Last week, Wikispaces invited me to give a Wikispaces in Education Webinar about four wiki projects I’ve done in high school English and history classes: The Broken World Wiki Textbook, a student-made textbook of modern world history from WW1 to WW2, featuring text, images, and embedded videos and student video lectures (and linked to a companion reflective class blog); the French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries, an historical fiction Writing-to-Learn unit in which student-created fictional characters interracted with their classmates’ characters in interlinked diary entries; King Lear Street Talk, a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, forcing the close line-by-line reading of 16th-century English necessary to adapt it to “Sopranos”-style modern English; and the 1001 Flat World Tales, a global creative writing workshop using the Six Traits of Effective Writing and a peer-reviewed Writing Workshop joining students from Hawaii, Colorado, and my classroom in Seoul.

The first three projects listed above were “local” collaborations, the fourth one global. I discuss in the webinar my thoughts on the relative merits of both approaches in the webinar. (I posted about those reflections most fully here.)

Thanks to Wikispaces for the opportunity to look back over two years of experiments in wiki pedagogy and introduce them all in one fell swoop.

If you want to read the “think-aloud” posts I wrote when designing these projects, check January to June or so of the Archives.

Here’s the event (it should start when I do, at almost 26:50, and finish a half hour later. The first 30 minutes are a tour of Wikispaces for beginners. The black blob on the screencast will disappear within a few seconds.):

• Schools Matter: College Board Introduces New Test to Sort Human Capital in 8th Grade

  Great. SAT for 8th-graders.

  tags: ETS, education

• TRAIL MIX: McCain Defends Palin on Imus, Bob Barr Claims McCain is ‘Toast’

  Another sign that the GOP troubles don’t stop with McCain. Might we see a new conservative party rise to replace the GOP?

  tags: elections08, conservative, politics, mccain

  • GOP’s Bob Barr: McCain a “faux conservative”
    
    Political Intelligence
    The Boston Globe
    By Foon Rhee
    
    
    It’s one thing when democrats say you’re doomed, or even a few notable Republicans. But even Bob Barr, the former GOP congressman from Georgia and current Libertarian nominee for president, is saying that John McCain is “toast,” according to Foon Rhee of the Globe’s “Political Intelligence.” Barr has said that McCain is on his “farewell tour” across America because he has no realistic chance of winning the presidential election. He goes on to say that McCain has an angry and mixed message, supports big spending policies, and has no chance of becoming president. Barr appeals to voters saying, “Now, principled conservatives can vote their conscience instead of voting for a faux conservative just because he carries the Republican label. A vote for McCain is a wasted vote.”

• Palin Clothes Spending Has Dems Salivating, Republicans Disgusted

  From the “Truth is more surreal than fiction” department:

  tags: palin, elections08, mccain, humor

  • Palin’s fashion budget for several weeks was more than four times the median salary of an American plumber ($37,514). To put it another way: Palin received more valuable clothes in one month than the average American household spends on clothes in 80 years. A Democrat put it in even blunter terms: her clothes were the cost of health care for 15 or so people.

• Peter Daou: On November Fourth, the Netroots Should Be More Than an Afterthought

  Inspiring essay on the role of political bloggers over the last eight years.

  tags: web2.0, politics, democracy, history, usa

• Obama and McCain in denial about deficits, economists say – Los Angeles Times

  tags: elections08, economy, taxes

  • “The promises of both candidates are in serious trouble,” said Penner, who is with the centrist Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research center on social and economic policy.

    “Both of them are already underwater about the deficits they would face even without the bailout,” he said. “And with the bailout, it’s clear they will have to adjust their promises. But we’re not hearing anything close to that from either of them.”

• Palin’s Wardrobe Saga Exposes McCain’s Flaws: Margaret Carlson

  Palin’s $150,000 campaign wardrobe – paid for by campaign money, thus taxpayer-funded – another example of REDISTRIBUTING THE WEALTH and REPUBLICAN SOCIALISM?

  Jeez, let’s put this campaign out of its misery. It’s an embarrassment in the eyes of the world.

  tags: elections08, mcain, palin

  • At the very moment Palin was
    celebrating herself as “your average hockey mom” in her
    convention speech, she was wearing a $2,500 silk jacket by
    Valentino.

  • Palin parading around like a Project Runway extra will take
    far less heat even though the bill she sent the committee makes
    Paris Hilton look like a Target shopper. With her $1.2 million in
    assets and six-figure salary, Palin could have footed the bill
    for whatever extreme makeover she felt was in order.

    It’s not a victimless crime. That $150,000 comes from funds
    that a respected incumbent like New Hampshire Republican Senator
    John Sununu — struggling not to be dragged down by the McCain-
    Palin ticket — desperately needs.

    Earlier it came out that Palin had charged the government
    for $17,000 in per-diem payments for 300 days she spent in her
    own house. Now we find she charged the state for trips that
    resemble vacations if not junkets.

  • A stunning 55 percent now think her unqualified to be
    president. Even as more people find her unsuited to the job,
    she’s enlarging it. She says that as vice president her duties
    would include being “in charge of the U.S. Senate.” The RNC
    should have spent its money for a tutorial on the Constitution.

    In choosing Palin, McCain ignored the old rule to pander to
    your base in the primary and break their hearts in the general
    election. Palin was a gift to the already committed. A hunter-
    gatherer from the last frontier with a large family and knockout
    good looks, she even turned an out-of-wedlock pregnancy that
    could have put off evangelicals as an example of lax childrearing
    or Hollywood ethics into a story of teenagers in love doing the
    right thing.

  • What she does well is
    hardly enough to compensate for what she does poorly.

    In the short run, she made McCain happier than he’d been in
    months and served to remind people of his maverick side. But in
    the end his impulsive choice proved more reminiscent of the
    impetuous young McCain who hated authority, amassed demerits at
    the Naval Academy and ticked off colleagues as a grandstanding
    hothead.

    The errors we make that hurt the most are the unforced ones.
    Palin cost McCain his standing with many Republicans and lost him
    the endorsement of his friend, Colin Powell, the man he called
    his “favorite living hero.” On “Meet the Press” last Sunday,
    Powell said Palin raised doubts about McCain. “I don’t believe
    she’s ready to be president of the United States, which is the
    job of the vice president.”

    For all the experience 72 years has brought McCain, it
    hasn’t brought him good judgment. We didn’t know that before
    Palin. We know it now.

    (Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How
    George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White
    House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News
    columnist.

• Op-Ed Columnist – The Real Plumbers of Ohio – NYTimes.com

  Written by this year’s Nobel Prize winner in Economics. Oh wait, that makes him an elitist. And this is the mainstream liberal media anyway.

  Let me look for an analysis by Joe the Plumber, or Joe Six-Pack, or Joe Blow to satisfy the real Pro-America Americans.

  tags: economy, usa, elections08, mccain, obama

• Harold Meyerson – The Power of Two Myths – washingtonpost.com

  More on the history and facts of voter fraud and voter suppression politics.

  tags: elections08, democracy, usa

  • For years, the Republican response to the rising number of non-white voters in particular has been: If you can’t win their vote, suppress it. So the GOP has propagated the myth that large numbers of people are voting who shouldn’t be, that voter registration groups such as ACORN, which the Republican ticket regularly attacks, are, like the big-city machines of yore, casting ballots in the name of the dead and stealing elections.

    Ferreting out these nefarious activities became a central focus of the Justice Department under John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales at the direction of the Bush White House. The department instructed all U.S. attorneys that the prosecution and conviction of voter-fraud perpetrators was, in Gonzales’s words, a “top priority.” Extensive investigations were undertaken across the nation. Yet, by 2005, as Art Levine reported in the American Prospect this April, only two people had been charged with falsifying or fabricating voter registration forms, and nobody had been charged with impersonating another voter.

    But the current attacks on ACORN provide the pretext for attempts to turn black voters and college students away from their polling places. In Ohio, the Republican war on voting has already begun. Hamilton County (that’s Cincinnati) prosecutor Joseph Deters, who is also the Southwest Ohio regional chair of the McCain campaign, subpoenaed the records of 266 new voters who have cast absentee ballots because he suspected their addresses might not comport to other public records. A GOP fundraiser in the state is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to deny 200,000 recent registrants the right to vote because their addresses on their registration forms don’t match those on their driver’s licenses, a discrepancy that suggests that the voters have moved or that the addresses were entered incorrectly by the registrar’s offices.

  • If you can’t find the crime here, you’re not alone. A number of the U.S attorneys fired by Gonzales got the ax for failing to uncover such crimes, though they conducted far-reaching investigations. David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico, told Levine that voter fraud “is like the boogeymen parents use to scare their children. It’s very frightening, and it doesn’t exist.”

    But it’s still a quite serviceable myth if Republicans can invoke it to block many thousands of new registrants from voting. It’s serviceable even if McCain is defeated, as the right can then claim that the election was stolen and that Barack Obama isn’t a legitimate president. On such racist garbage as African Americans voting fraudulently so they can collect welfare checks again is McCain staking his claim for the presidency.

• Countdown: McCain’s Voter Registration Fraud | Crooks and Liars

  This may be why the McCain team has suddenly gone quiet on its ACORN indignation – they have a much tighter case about this crime involving their own campaign. Arrests have been made.

  I guess we stick to the Socialism meme, while hoping nobody points out the campaign has “redistributed” donations to buy Sarah Palin almost $150,000 worth of NEW CLOTHES for her campaign appearances.

  I wish I were in the USA just to know how much people are talking about all these things.

  tags: elections08, mccain

• BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | New feathered dinosaur discovered

  Cool. Feathers were for display before they evolved into means of flight. Dinosaurs would be so much more interesting now, than when I studied and forgot them in grade school in the ’sixties, because now we know they descended, in a totally non-intuitive way, into birds. (And I probably screwed this summary up in several ways.)

  tags: evolution, science, china

  • The fossil of a “bizarre” feathered dinosaur from the era before birds evolved has been discovered in China.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.