Politics and Culture Reads around the Web 10/24/2008

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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.