Battleground Poll
October 30th, 2008
Via Ezra.
He Got This
October 30th, 2008
No comment necessary:
H/T: Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has a fine essay on what it all means.
Categories: Culture, General, Humor, News & Current Events, Politics | 1 Comment
May-Hee-Co
October 29th, 2008
I’m outta here. By the time I get back, we’ll have a new president elect, and plenty to talk about.
Blog amongst yourselves. Open thread.
Categories: Bloggin, Travel | 2 Comments
Quote of the Day, 2008-10-28
October 28th, 2008
Look: socialism is a word that has a meaning. It means public control of the means of production. It does not mean taxing the top bracket at 39%. Likewise, “collective ownership” has a meaning, and it does not mean the situation that obtains when the government can repeal tax cuts for the top 5% of the population.
Categories: Economics, Politics, Taxes | No Comments
Symbolic Expression in the Lower Primates
October 28th, 2008
Well, the conservatives are boycotting something again. When are they not?
This time it’s Pepsi-Cola. Seems Pepsi redesigned its logo, which they do every 5-10 years. The old sort-of-yin/yang symbol, in which red and blue areas inside a circle were separated by a wavy white stripe (with the edges of the separate areas parallel to each other), has been replaced by a similar circle in which the edges of the red and blue areas are not parallel, but all three (red, white, and blue) sort of curve upward to the right at different angles.
PowerLine, the right-wing mob-blog, has announced a Pepsi boycott in response to the new logo. Yes - the logo.
Why?, you might ask, if you were mentally normal and cared what goes on at Powerline. Well, it’s obvious. Pepsi has become part of the liberal media bias conspiracy. Their new logo is (obviously!) a subliminal propaganda effort aimed at reinforcing . . .
. . . the Obama campaign!
Because when you’re conservative, this is the way your mind works.
Note that the article that Powerline links to explains in detail that the logo update has been long-planned, and is tied into a project to adopt a distinct “smile” symbol for each of Pepsi’s different products (the new logo’s curves are supposed to evoke increasing degrees of smiling - because, if you’re an advertising executive, that’s the way your mind works). They read the explanation and still insisted this was all part of a political campaign. Because, just like Proctor & Gamble publicly advocates Satanism with all its products (another perennial right-wing boycott target), PepsiCo decided it had nothing better to do with its $84 billion in assets than tie it to a partisan political campaign that will be over before the logo is rolled out. If you’re conservative, that sounds believable.
More and more I think conservative rhetoric is meaningless in itself, but merely serves as a kind of anthropological evidence of how certain primitive intelligences struggle to make sense of the world. Conservative blogs are like those shape-puzzle experiments with monkeys: it’s not what they say, but how they say it, that’s so fascinating.
Categories: Culture, Economics, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics | 4 Comments
Quote of the Day, 2008-10-27
October 27th, 2008
Buchananite Larison, on why the dittoheads are part of what’s wrong with the modern GOP:
However, in point of fact, yes, that audience is part of what’s wrong with the Republican Party. Part of what has been wrong with the GOP is that its rank-and-file members take their political advice and insights from radio entertainers who seem to understand little about political reality and even less about policy, and who substitute bluster for understanding. When they are confronted with an administration that does much the same, they have seemed only too willing to buy into the bluster. They remain steadfastly loyal to a failed President and his indefensible decisions, and they break with him only when he supports measures that are absolutely intolerable and even then they do this only when the President is profoundly unpopular and no longer very influential. This audience may have the right views about many things, but in practice that translates into reliable loyalty to a party that virtually never serves their interests, which enables the politicians who support all of the intolerable policies that they themselves reject.
[Of course, I disagree with him about the possibility of them being right about a lot of things...]
Categories: Politics, Smackdown! | 2 Comments
The Red, White, and MILF
October 26th, 2008
God, I really want to be offended by this, but I’m just too turned-on!
Categories: Culture, General, Humor, News & Current Events, Politics, Satire, Smackdown! | 5 Comments
Moyer
October 25th, 2008
OK, OK, I take it back. Tonight he got a quality start: 6.1 IP, 3 ER, 4 H, 1 BB, 5 K.
Categories: Humble Pie, MLB/MiLB, Sports | No Comments
Sarah Palin: Not a Joke, but a Victim of . . . the Abortion Culture
October 25th, 2008
Man, they are insane over at National Review! I mean it literally - their minds don’t work normally. I usually think that’s just the inherent limitation of being a right-wing second-stringer (you’re already lower than a very low bar), but here I’m not even talking about their developmental team at The Corner - today NRO runs a feature piece by some professional abortion-myth peddler that simply takes a wig-out and keeps on flippin’. The reason Sarah Palin is a laughingstock, you see, is that . . . her critics all feel guilty about abortion.
[Digglah: Forget the baseball tie-ins. The Gibbering Abortion-Rights Exquisite Corpse Dadaesque Word Association Prize has now been retired.]
Here’s Kevin Burke explaining what everyone else pretty much figured needed no explanation:
Some of the very personal and often uncharitable criticism of vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her family may have a relationship to [the country's] collective grief, shame, and guilt from personal involvement in the abortion of an unborn child.
Right. The massive outpouring of largely political, fact-driven, and entirely reasonable criticism of a complete airhead who consistently offers an unrecognizably garbled version of basic constitutional principles affecting the job she is currently seeking, began her campaign for that job by stating she did not know what it entailed, invariably responds to the simplest substantive questions with idiotic evasions and irrelevancies, cites the most bizarrely tangential facts - often incorrectly - as evidence of her own preparedness for office, conducted personal vendettas in office and attempted to ban library books as mayor, has been cited by her own state’s attorney for abuse of authority as governor and is still under investigation for related transgressions, cannot name any Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade, cannot name any magazine or newspaper she herself reads (while claiming to read “all of them”), constantly infantalizes her office and her own supporters by filling public appearances with childish slogans, jargon, meaningless folksy expressions, and winking in lieu of answers to topical questions, campaigns almost exclusively by vague generalizations and character assassination, denies scientific consensus on environmental protection, global warming, and creationism, and adheres to extremist religious superstitions about witchcraft, “the apocalypse”, and God’s supposed direct intervention in her career and electoral campaign . . . is an expression of everyone’s personal feelings about . . . abortion.
What kind of a nut thinks so? The kind of nut who spends his life promoting the entirely made-up, and repeatedly scientifically disproven, myth of “post-abortion syndrome” - a supposed psychological malady that afflicts women who have had abortions (and now apparently the entire nation). It’s particularly an issue in Palin’s case, you see, because she has a child with Down Syndrome, but the majority of such pregnancies are aborted, so all those women are - he knows this - racked with guilt over the fact that Palin is a better woman and mother than they are. They attack her to assuage their own feelings of guilt and inadequacy. I’m not making this up (though, obviously, Burke is):
Seeing the Palin family, in a very visible public forum, with an uncompromising and public pro life philosophy arouses deeply repressed feelings in post abortive parents, as well as media members, counselors, health care professionals, politicians and others who promote abortion rights, especially the abortion of children with challenges such as Down Syndrome. These powerful repressed feelings of grief, guilt and shame can be deflected from the source of the wound (i.e., abortion) and projected onto an often uncharitable focus upon the trigger of these painful emotions…the Palin family.
Burke, by the way, is a founder of a Catholic anti-choice organization specifically dedicated to promoting the “post-abortion” myth. It’s his job to say nonsense like this. But it’s important to re-emphasize that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any of this is true - this Burke clown, and people like him, made this up and just keep saying it. The “post-abortion syndrome” lie has been disproven again and again, by multiple studies in different settings over a period of almost 30 years - there is simply no general phenomenon of depression or regret following abortion (though individual women have differing reactions, of course), and on average women who have had abortions are happier after having done so than they were before. As to whether people’s reactions to Palin have to do with guilt over abortion, he obviously can’t know that and it’s obviously insane. It makes as much sense as saying they love Obama because of feelings of guilt about suntan lotion. He made it up, and asserts it as fact because it serves his purpose. He’s been doing that for decades, shamelessly, in direct contravention of established evidence proving his statements to be lies, and with no evident regard for that fact.
What strikes me, more and more over the years, is the bizarre lengths the anti-woman crowd goes to to promote their false and absurd view of women, sex, and the world in general. They really do see everything as related to those topics. Archbishop Egan, in the risible and obnoxious essay cited in my last post on this topic, claims to hope for “one day, please God, when the stranglehold on public opinion in the United States has been released by the extremists for whom abortion is the center of their political and moral life”. Can he really be that un-self-aware? Is there anyone who better fits that description than people like him and Burke - for whom the merest mention (or photograph) of a fetus is grist for an unhinged and reality-free rant about abortion, in whose minds the entirely predictable failings of an absurdly unqualified political candidate are actually caused by a fictional product of abortion that they themselves made up out of whole cloth? (I guess Colin Powell, Christopher Buckley, Charles Fried, and Ken Adelman are all suffering from “post-abortion syndrome”.)
There is a kind of funhouse-mirror aspect to the ways these people’s minds work. Back in 1994, when the Edvard Munch painting The Scream was stolen from the Norwegian National Gallery, an anti-abortion group announced that they could get it returned if anti-abortion propaganda were shown on national television (in fact they had no connection to the incident and were just grandstanding). After 9-11, Jerry Falwell famously declared that “the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked.” (It also turned out that gays, lesbians, feminists, and the ACLU were involved.) In 2006, a panel of Republicans in the Missouri State Legislature investigated the problem of illegal immigration (into Missouri?), and discovered it was the result of “the effects of 30 years of abortion.” It is a commonplace within the crypto-racist right that Western (i.e., white) societies are facing a “demographic bomb”, resulting from the different birthrates of white and non-white population groups, caused by abortion and birth control. Certain Catholic scholars, including John Noonan and Philip Rieff, have declared that abortion is itself the product of the “therapeutic culture” which seeks “wellness” (scare quotes always, please) rather than rule-following - sexual autonomy is for them a mental illness. The latest fad phrase among conservative thinkers is “the culture of death” - our entire society, or at least its progressive faction, is devoted to killing human beings, not because preserving biological life is not always the only goal in the healthcare setting, but as some sort of ideological principle in itself. Another fad phrase is “the contracepting culture” - society that accepts the horrors of sex with contraception (do you really think I’m making this up?). And of course, Sarah Palin declares that William Ayers, who helped bomb a number of government installations during an illegal war while causing no deaths, is a terrorist, but when questioned whether the bombers and shooters who murdered numerous people in legal abortion clinics were terrorists refused repeatedly to address the question.
It appears there simply isn’t any issue or circumstance, however far-fetched, that isn’t relevant to abortion; there isn’t any problem or trend, however dubious, that isn’t caused by abortion; there isn’t any need or difficulty, however unlikely, that can’t be solved by criminalizing sexual freedom. The bizarre obsession that leads to such thinking, and the contortions and delusions it requires to make such leaps while ignoring the glaring contradictions they entail, is difficult to grasp. It is simply very hard for a normal person - one who isn’t terrified by sex and obsessed with controlling and limiting other people’s sexual freedom - to imagine how this kind of thinking originates.
Make no mistake: this has nothing to do with taking a reasoned position on the appropriate balance of moral rights and interests between a pregnant woman and her fetus. This is simple full-gone loony craziness. These people make up absurd factual claims and baldly lie when they are refuted, hypothesize bizarre psychological projections upon those they disagree with, and obsessively posit - with dizzying certainty - the most tenuous and far-fetched links between virtually any event or phenomenon in the world and their consuming misogynist bete noir. They’re nuts. And these are the leaders - the thinkers - in the anti-choice movement. This is what the anti-choice movement is like when it’s not ranting at patients in front of health clinics or shooting doctors. This is what being anti-choice is like at its most subtle, sophisticated, and learned: bat-shit loony.
[NB: Crossposted to my bioethics blog Sufficient Scruples. I don't usually post that much about bioethics on this blog, but Lean Left is picked up by the aggregator Memeorandum, and my bioethics blog is not, so on topics where I think it's important to reach a wider audience, or to respond directly to posts from Memeorandum, I sometimes crosspost.]
Categories: Church & State, Culture, General, Health, Legal Issues, Media, News & Current Events, Privacy, Religion | 8 Comments
Another one
October 24th, 2008
Gina Gershon does a pretty good impersonation of Sarah Palin - not quite Tina Fey-level, but at least Lisa Nova quality. (”I jus’ wanna say, G-a-w-d Bliss Amur-ka . . . an’ fuck you, Katie Couric!”[wink])
It disturbs me that all the women who can do such good impersonations of Palin are so goddamn hot. Now I’m starting to hate my fantasies, which leaves me with pretty much no social life at all.
Categories: Church & State, Culture, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics | No Comments
More Heartwarming Misogyny From the Right Wing
October 24th, 2008
Cardinal Egan, supremely obnoxious Catholic Archbishop of New York, has an essay up on some Web site, complete with the standard handwringing condescension and heart-tugging photos, declaiming how desperately we need to take control of women’s bodies and impose forced pregnancy as a matter of law and culture. Its contents are typical of this well-worn genre: a lame argument about whether a human fetus is a “human being”, willful elision of the difference between biological identity and moral status, sweeping moral declarations grounded on nothing but his unreflective certainty, and of course obligatory references to Hitler, Stalin, and Dred Scott.
The heart of this superficial and nonsensical (or perhaps it could be said: “a-sensical”) piece is a photograph of a 20-week fetus - a photograph which, Egan declares, proves by itself that abortion is wrong and it is utterly worthless to even consider the actual moral issues raised by the question.
Why, you might inquire, have I not delved into the opinion of philosophers and theologians about the matter? And even worse: Why have I not raised the usual questions about what a “human being” is, what a “person” is, what it means to be “living,” and such? People who write books and articles about abortion always concern themselves with these kinds of things. Even the justices of the Supreme Court who gave us “Roe v. Wade” address them. Why do I neglect philosophers and theologians? Why do I not get into defining “human being,” defining “person,” defining “living,” and the rest? Because, I respond, I am sound of mind and endowed with a fine set of eyes, into which I do not believe it is well to cast sand. I looked at the photograph, and I have no doubt about what I saw and what are the duties of a civilized society if what I saw is in danger of being killed by someone who wishes to kill it or, if you prefer, someone who “chooses” to kill it. In brief: I looked, and I know what I saw.
Why it is that the moral attack dogs of the right wing are always so eager to proclaim their own lack of comprehension I don’t know, but it is no longer surprising as a practical fact, and still less in light of the product of their “reasoning”. But ask yourself: who would take such idiocy seriously in any other context? On what moral issue would anyone seriously say “I saw a picture of an organism affected by this subject that moves me in some way, so I refuse to think about it carefully or read what the best thinkers on the subject have said, and that justifies both my unsupported, idiosyncratic religious beliefs about it and my intention to impose them on everyone else in the country!”? Who would seriously claim that not thinking about, reading about, or analyzing a serious problem could possibly produce a correct answer, or was a proper ground for imposing a solution to it as a matter of law and policy? Well, who but a religious right-winger?
But the lack of comprehension, and the vast evasions and logical gaps, Egan’s supposed “discussion” shows are par for the course, from this source and the anti-choice brigade in general. It’s hardly worth bothering with. What catches my eye in this piece - literally - is that photo, and the way it is used. Egan seems sincerely convinced that photos have moral meanings. (” Please do me the favor of looking at it carefully. . . . The matter becomes even clearer and simpler if you obtain from the National Geographic Society two extraordinary DVDs . . . entitled “In the Womb” . . . [and] “In the Womb—Multiples”.) Now, all activist groups use photographs to illustrate their causes, and to manipulate the viewer emotionally. But they usually do the courtesy of providing some sort of argument for their position. Egan declares that none is necessary - the fetuses in the photos almost literally speak for themselves. And that fact illustrates the most important thing about the anti-choice position.
To be anti-choice is, in a fundmental and particularly vicious way, to be anti-woman. It is to declare that women may have no control over their own bodies with respect to their reproductive functions, or over their entire lives as affected by those functions - and that society, invariably men, may declare to women in what circumstances they may make their own choices and follow their own paths in life, and in what circumstances those paths will be dictated to them against their wills. And, more practically, it is to put the life of every woman on earth, before and during her fertile years at least, and afterwards as a result of that earlier constraint, entirely and completely on a contingent basis, subject to conditions determined by others (men), and forever out of the control of the women themselves. Everything any woman does, wants, or plans for can be derailed in a moment by a trivial accident of biology - a condition that can be dealt with easily, safely, and cheaply by means that men choose to criminalize to prevent women from making their own choices about. There is nothing in any woman’s life that can be depended on or confidently planned for, because everything any women chooses can be disrupted or swept away, not by being pregnant, but by being pregnant and forced to remain so against her will, physically prevented, and prohibited by law, from acting on her own choices on that matter. And every woman who lives in a misogynist society, which is to say every woman in the world (with the only partial exception of women in pro-choice countries), must live with that knowledge every minute of every day - must know that anything she thinks about or plans for more than a few months into the future of her own life can only be hypothetical if men who hate her choose to make her their prisoner, by way of her own body.
To be anti-choice is to take women out of their own lives in a fundamental way. It is longstanding principle and practice of the right wing that women exist as functionaries for men - they are important insofar as they are fulfilling the roles that have been appointed to them as wives, mothers, sexual servants, housekeepers, purity symbols, or what have you, but they may not choose their roles for themselves, and they may not choose roles outside their position of inferiority to those who dictate those roles. (Slight exceptions are made for women who use their public positions to keep other women down.) Women’s lives, under misogyny, are tools for men’s comfort, and women are what men decide they will be. The anti-choice position takes this perspective to a sickeningly literal extreme. Invariably, anti-choice literature and arguments are focused entirely on the fetus. Indeed the degree of fetus-worship on the religious right is unsettling, and often very creepy. (One Catholic group stole aborted fetuses from a hospital, baptized them, and buried them in a religious ceremony in explicit violation of the instructions of the women who had aborted them. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum and his wife took a miscarried fetus home in a box, named it, and made their other children hold it. Anti-stem-cell-research advocates paraded their own children before Congressional committees dressed in T-shirts reading “Former Embryo”.) Invariably, there is no mention of actual women in anti-choice discussions of abortion. Women are simply not part of the issue of abortion, for the right wing. Abortion, for them, is only and entirely a question of something happening to a fetus - which they invest with full moral standing for virtually incoherent reasons almost always grounded on sectarian religious beliefs - with no question at all of what it means for the woman who is pregnant against her wishes, a woman of actual moral standing, with a full life well underway, plans and projects hanging in the balance, moral interests to be taken into account, and moral agency of her own that should vest her with control of that life and those plans and projects. She literally does not exist, in almost any right-wing discussion of abortion.
And Egan, with his airily articulate photo, makes this ludicrously plain. The photograph of his morally magical fetus proves that the fetus is indeed magical in one way: it exists outside any woman’s uterus. The strangely pristine and carefully-arranged fetus in this picture floats against a plain backdrop with no hint that it should be connected to, let alone that it lives inside, the body of a thinking, feeling, reproductively mature woman actively engaged in her own life, with thoughts and desires about how that life should go and whether or not she chooses any particular path for it. (There is a hint of umbilical cord and the fetal side of the placenta, but of course they don’t attach to . . . anything.) The fetus that speaks so eloquently to Egan has no visible connection to the woman who could actually speak, and articulate her own decisions about her own body, if she existed at all, which she does not in the picture Egan says tells us everything we need to know about abortion. And when Egan contemptuously dismisses the concept of “person” with scare quotes, because it would “cast sand” into his eyes to consider the difference between this fetus and the actual person whose body it is living inside, that person whom Egan declares has no power to choose whether anyone or anything can live inside her own body, he again sets real persons at nought, in favor of the fetus whose interests (so to speak) stand unopposed by those of the non-existing woman it lives within.
It takes some trick to remove women from pregnancy, but the Catholic church has that one down pat. In his 1,300-word paen to forced pregnancy, unembarassed by any actual thinking, he manages never once, in any context, to use the word “woman”. He does, of course, work in “mother” - 10 times. Women, for Egan, do not exist - only mothers do. A pregnant woman is a mother - there is no distinction for Egan. She is certainly not a woman who faces a choice whether she wants to be a mother, or whether she will or can become a mother. And women who are not mothers, apparently, don’t exist at all - they simply live their lives knowing that nothing they choose or want can stand against their eventually becoming a “mother”, when Egan has decided that is what they are, whether or not they want to. Remarkably, fetuses do not exist for Egan, either: not a single use of that word. Every reference to the fetus employs the phrase “human being” (it appears alone 9 times; “innocent human being” 16 times). Egan has already embraced ignorance of the difference between “human being” and “moral person”, so perhaps he thinks he is saying something when he says that, but notice that “human being” is never used in reference to a woman (pregnant or otherwise). Only fetuses are human; only mothers are women, and women are only mothers; women are not human. That’s all you need to know about abortion.
Unless, of course, you take women seriously - seriously enough at least to notice that they exist, but more importantly seriously enough to acknowledge they are moral agents and have interests and values that demand respect in their own right. If you think women matter, and that women are part of the question of abortion, and if you are even passingly aware that women care about their own lives and the direction and contents of those lives, you might bother to put women into the equation, at the very least.
Or you could be a smarmy, anti-intellectual, contemptuously misogynist asshole. There’s plenty of company for you there.
[NB: Cross-posted a Sufficient Scruples, my bioethics blog.]
Categories: Church & State, Culture, General, Legal Issues, News & Current Events, Politics, Privacy, Religion | 24 Comments
Civic Duty: Done!
October 24th, 2008
I voted today. (So did Kevin — I know, because I saw him there.) It took about an hour. So if something dramatic happens between now and Nov. 4, I’ll have to hope that the electors do their constitutionally-envisioned duty. 
Not surprisingly, I voted more or less straight-ticket Democrat. This doesn’t matter much, because for president and senate, the Republican will almost certainly win overwhelmingly in Tennessee, whereas for the local offices, the Democrat is equally assured of victory. One exception to the party-line voting: there was one office where the incumbent (a Democrat) was running unopposed. I refuse to vote for anyone who’s running unopposed, so for that office, I wrote in Kevin. I’m sure he won’t mind.
Categories: Politics | No Comments
Thanks, Sheriff Taylor (and Opie, and Richie, and Fonz)
October 24th, 2008
I wrote once previously about Sheriff Taylor and Li’l Opie, characters from the old Andy Griffith Show who embodied the values of decency, fairness, and support for Constitutional rights that had once been mainstream and are now lost.
Well, Sheriff Andy and Opie are back, along with Richie Cunningham and The Fonz, to remind us of what mainstream America once stood for, and how we can get it back again.
Yes, Sheriff Taylor endorses Barack Obama, as do Richie and Fonzie, with Li’l Opie looking on in admiration. Ron Howard rounded up his old acting buddies to reprise their former roles in a painfully low-budget video (they somehow couldn’t find an actual stream for Opie and Andy to fish in, or take the time to move the modern cars out of the background as Fonzie leans against his cherried-out 50s-model Chevy).
Watching Ron Howard shave off that crappy beard in order to play 8-year-old Opie again is the second-best part of the thing. (The one man in America who most desperately needs to live down his youth has simply never been able to grow convincing facial hair - while his balding skull and hollow cheekbones are now fully into scary-corpse territory.) But the best part is hearing Sheriff Taylor do himself proud, endorsing a black man for President while noting that “People are funny. . . . Sometimes change scares ‘em.” Richie and Fonzie join in as well, lamenting the Bush/Cheney years and agreeing that “now we have a chance to make it right.”
They’re hardly the first actors to endorse Obama, but there’s a real resonance to these people, recalling roles that stereotype America as the country likes to see itself, doing so. Andy Griffith is particularly heartwarming here, as he not only represents the generation that consistently polls lowest in support of Obama (Obama’s support declines with each increasing age group; McCain’s increases in almost mirror-image fashion), but he created the Sheriff Taylor role from his own stage act - if Andy Griffith says Sheriff Taylor endorses Obama, then Sheriff Taylor, and the audience he represents, by-God endorses Obama. And, though I wouldn’t have predicted it, I’m not surprised by it.
Thanks, Sheriff Taylor. I knew we could count on you.
H/T: Weekly Standard
Categories: Culture, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics, Race | 1 Comment
Friday Game Time
October 24th, 2008
Truth Invaders! They also have a decent summary of the relative truthfulness of the two campaigns; neither campaign is particularly good (Obama “wins” at just 52% truthful), but that doesn’t mean the two campaigns are equally misleading.
(via the Fact Check Wire)
Categories: Bloggin, I do too have a life, Weekend Flame Bait | No Comments
Perfect
October 23rd, 2008
From Ben Smith’s blog:
Upon arriving at the Hamilton County Board of Elections in Cincinnati to vote early today I happened upon some friends of my mother’s — three small, elderly Jewish women. They were quite upset as they were being refused admitance to the polling location due to their Obama T-Shirts, hats and buttons. Apparently you cannot wear Obama/McCain gear into polling locations here in Ohio…. They were practically on the verge of tears.
After a minute or two of this a huge man (6′5″, 300 lbs easy) wearing a Dale Earnhardt jacket and Bengal’s baseball cap left the voting line, came up to us and introduced himself as Mike. He told us he had overheard our conversation and asked if the ladies would like to borrow his jacket to put over their t-shirts so they could go in and vote. The ladies quickly agreed. As long as I live I will never forget the image of these 80-plus-year-old Jewish ladies walking into the polling location wearing a huge Dale Earnhardt racing jacket that came over their hands and down to their knees!
Mike patiently waited for each woman to cast their vote, accepted their many thanks and then got back in line (I saved him a place while he was helping out the ladies). When Mike got back in line I asked him if he was an Obama supporter. He said that he was not, but that he couldn’t stand to see those ladies so upset. I thanked him for being a gentleman in a time of bitter partisanship and wished him well.
After I voted I walked out to the street to find my mother’s friends surrouding our new friend Mike — they were laughing and having a great time. I joined them and soon learned that Mike had changed his mind in the polling booth and ended up voting for Obama. When I asked him why he changed his mind at the last minute, he explained that while he was waiting for his jacket he got into a conversation with one of the ladies who had explained how the Jewish community, and she, had worked side by side with the black community during the civil rights movements of the ’60s, and that this vote was the culmination of those personal and community efforts so many years ago. That this election for her was more than just a vote … but a chance at history.
Mike looked at me and said, “Obama’s going to win, and I didn’t want to tell my grandchildren some day that I had an opportunity to vote for the first black president, but I missed my chance at history and voted for the other guy.”
America is different, now. Obama didn’t make it so, but he’s helping us to realize it. And slowly, we’re waking from the nightmare and finding our childish fears were unnecessary. Let’s hope we remember it, and continue to reject the policies and politics based on those fears.
Categories: Culture, General, News & Current Events, Politics, Race | 2 Comments
Huckabee 2012?
October 22nd, 2008
Larison seems to think so:
It seems to me that Huckabee now starts to look much better to the conservative elites who were ridiculing him as Huckleberry just half a year ago; he becomes the relatively safe governing choice who can also generate tremendous grassroots enthusiasm. Many of his former critics may come to recognize the missed opportunity of running with Huckabee’s pseudo-populism on economics this year, and going forward he may be able to develop a policy agenda that is not limited to praising the wonders of the Fair Tax. Not having been a critic of Palin, Huckabee will not have alienated her supporters, and he will probably carefully avoid doing so over the next few years in the same way that he stayed on good terms with McCain voters. Provided that he never, ever again tells the ridiculous story about how foreign wars make it possible for children to have schooldesks, and provided that he could get someone to give him some money, he could become the presumptive frontrunner. Having spoken out against the bailout early on, he will be well-positioned to satisfy libertarians and populists alike. Given the deterioration of the McCain campaign since it went to war with journalists, the value of favorable free media coverage, which Huckabee was able to attract so effectively during the primaries, cannot be underestimated.
I tend to agree with this. For all the hubbub surrounding Sarah Palin, she never really scared me. Huckabee, on the other hand, scared the bejesus out of me, and not just because he’s a bejesus freak — he’s incredibly charismatic and just plain likable, and is very, very good at hiding his bat-shit crazy side.
Categories: Politics | 6 Comments
The PSH Escalates
October 22nd, 2008
Now Xrlq is really losing it. And Patterico engages in parsing that would make Bill Clinton proud.
Categories: Bloggin, Politics | No Comments
Ted’s Obit
October 22nd, 2008
If you can spare it, please give to the Hospice of the Chesapeake, per his family’s wishes.
The full obituary:
James E. Barber, Jr.
(October 1, 1953 - October 18, 2008)James E. Barber, Jr., “Ted”, 55, of Edgewater, MD died on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008 at his home after a lengthy battle with cancer. Born in Attleboro, Mass. on October 1, 1953, Ted was the son of James E. and Rosamond (Wellman) Barber of Wrentham, Mass. He graduated from Brown University with degrees in Engineering and Business.
Ted worked as a computer software engineer for many years. Most recently he was employed by Pyramid Builders in Annapolis, MD where he was a project manager who was also involved in the strategic planning for the future of the company. An avid Boston Red Sox fan, Ted also enjoyed architecture, woodworking, billiards, snow skiing and waterskiing.
Ted was the beloved husband of Susan Barber, whom he married on April 14, 2005. He is also survived by two stepsons: Nicholas and Zachery Cerverizzo of Edgewater, MD; and three sisters: Susan Derus of Milwaukee, WI, Rosamond Barber of New York, NY and Ellen Barber of Melbourne, Australia. He was preceded in death by his sister, Elizabeth Barber.
Family and friends are invited to Ted’s Life Celebration at the GEORGE P. KALAS FUNERAL HOME, 2973 Solomons Island Rd., Edgewater, MD on Wednesday from 7 to 9 p.m. where a memorial service will be held on Thursday, Oct. 23 at 11 a.m. Interment will be private.
In lieu of flowers contributions may be made in Ted’s name to the Hospice of the Chesapeake, 445 Defense Hwy., Annapolis, MD 21401. Please sign the online guestbook at: www.kalasfuneralhomes.com
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Sarah Palin: Enemy of Government Waste
October 21st, 2008
Unless it’s her waste:
Gov. Sarah Palin charged the state for her children to travel with her, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to specify that they were on official business.
The charges included costs for hotel and commercial flights for three daughters to join Palin to watch their father in a snowmobile race, and a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel.
In all, Palin has charged the state $21,012 for her three daughters’ 64 one-way and 12 round-trip commercial flights since she took office in December 2006. In some other cases, she has charged the state for hotel rooms for the girls.
Whoops! Let’s see if anything comes of this.
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