Beyond School

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.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

• 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.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

• 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.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Best Caption 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.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

• 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 Amer