Standing up in Iran

Solid picture.

I think this lady's facing longer odds than even the picture suggests. But you gotta admire someone who's looking down the street at that - and still has the guts to stand there.

(H/t to Dynagirl)

Think a happy thought

...and watch this little factoid devour it whole.

The projected US deficit for this year is larger than the GDP of almost every other nation on earth. Only nine nation's GDPs exceed our 2009 deficit - and we're one of them.

Owch.

(Via The Big Picture)

Obama's tax policy

I so totally love this post on FiveThirtyEight.com:

Shorter version: Yes, overpaid mouthpieces of the White House Press Corps: your taxes will be going up. Exactly as promised. Stop your pouting. No one likes you.

AIG OMFG II

Here we go again,

AIG, already propped up to the tune of 150 billion dollars, is passing the hat again.

That'd be three bailouts for AIG, three for CitiGroup (assuming the latest common stock nonsense goes through). Poor old BoA only has two.

Who will step forward to claim the title of biggest corporate welfare queen??

(H/t to TPM)

By the way, if you have any curiosity about the "Swedish model" of bank nationalization everyone keeps talking about, you could do worse than to listen to Planet Money's summary.

They didn't nationalize all the banks, they nationalized two. The first bank because it was 80% government-owned when it became insolvent - the second because the bankers who owned it gave the keys to the government and essentially walked off.

Interesting stuff.

Senator Franken?

The admittedly partisan Campaign Silo is reporting that Al Franken has pulled ahead in the MN recount.

Coleman's plan of challenging ballots like this:

-appears to be failing.

That a ballot like this was challenged shows you the nature of Coleman's tactics - drop Franken's total so the tallys will show your guy ahead. Win in the media and put pressure on your opponent to drop out.

This tactic founders when it meets something like Minnesota's incredibly open recount process. (Not surprisingly, the canvassing board was able to rule that the voter had indicated a preference for Franken.)

Viva transparency.

Democracy index

I'd read an article by Heather Gerkin awhile back that finally sank in - particularly this part that she added on the Election Law Blog:

I have recently proposed that we create a Democracy Index, ranking states and localities based on how well they run elections. Without good data on how the election system is performing, voters learn that there's a problem only when an election is so close that the outcome is in doubt and reporters devote the time necessary to investigate what actually happened. That's a bit like measuring annual rainfall by counting how often lightning strikes. The Index would help us assess the problems that occur routinely, before they cause what Rick Hasen has called an "electoral meltdown." Moreover, it would allow voters to reward strong performance. Right now, voters lack the information they need to differentiate between a bullet dodged and a well-run system ...

Makes an awful lot of sense to me.

Rather like a public-facing rating system for restaraunt cleanliness. We assume the place we go to is decent - but we have no information to base that on.

Underachievers thrive on that kind of a system. My sister used to tell me horror stories of her ride alongs with restaurant inspectors. After she was done, I asked her what happened to the places that were bad, but not bad enough to be shut down.

She laughed. "They keep doing what they're doing. After all, from their perspective - they passed."

I imagine there are any number of localities that are teetering on the edge of failure - waiting for a close election to burst into the news.

It'd be nice if they were in the spotlight before the next election, no?

Blissfully anticlimactic

E has dubbed it so. And thank the powers that it was so.

The only drama left is whether or not Obama makes it to 370.

Obama was the statesman, so petty gloating and hectoring is left to the bloggers.

So, allow me to address the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.:

Get the hell out of our White House, you pin-headed schmuck. You and your wingnut administration aren't running things anymore.

NBC, ABC - you are tools

NBC and ABC are calling Pennsylvania for Obama.

Here's the data they're sharing to back that up:

ABC:

NBC:

SoooOOoo, what are they basing this on?

I hate the networks.

Destroying the fabric of democracy

(via the American Prospect)

In many of the states, such as Indiana and Nevada, where fraudulent voter registration forms have been turned in, local laws mandate that ACORN refrain from destroying completed forms, no matter how fraudulent they appear. As a result, ACORN turns in all forms, even in states where that isn't required, according to spokesman Brian Kittenring. ACORN says it labels problematic forms in order to help local election officials weed out bad forms.

[snip]

ACORN claims that it fires employees who consistently file fraudulent forms, but ACORN is compelled to turn forms in anyway. "We label and identify them with problematic card cover sheets. Our interpretation of the law is that we turn all of these in; it would be so much easier if we could just throw away Mickey Mouse," says Kittenring. In a Nevada affidavit ACORN claimed it was firing workers at a rate of 10 per week.

While I would certainly not suggest that ACORN doesn't have their problems, it seems to me that narratives of wholesale fraud that ignore realities like those mentioned in this story are tailoring reality to their worldview.

Ground game

(Via FiveThirtyEight.com's Sean Quinn)

Anecdotes from visiting campaign offices around the country.

Shades of the WaPo article Sean refers to at the outset of his post:

This week, a number of veteran GOP operatives who orchestrate door-to-door efforts to get voters to the polls were told they should not expect to receive plane tickets, rental cars or hotel rooms from the campaign.

"The desire for parity on television comes at the expense of investment in paid boots on the ground," said one top Republican strategist who has been privy to McCain's plans. "The folks who will oversee the volunteer operation have been told to get out into the field on their own nickel."

Political campaigns are stocked with volunteers - it's the only way they function - but not paying your operatives for travel can only hurt their effectiveness.

But the other story, the story on which we've had a running eight-week exclusive in 36 separate On the Road pieces and counting, is that John McCain's ground campaign is just not happening. It hasn't been happening, without Sarah Palin there might be four or five volunteers across the entire nation left, and now, per Mosk's piece at WaPo, it looks like it will be happening even less.

 Read the full post.

To those interested in reducing voter registration fraud...

(Via CJR)

National Campaign for Fair Elections's Jonah Goldman offers a smack-your-head solution to voter registration fraud:

Require state governments to register everybody.

Seriously.

Australia does it - hell, they even require everyone to vote.

A representative nominee

Sandy Levinson over at Balkinization has a really excellent point about the nomination process that got us here:

Republicans were praised for quickly wrapping up their contest by virtue of having adopted a first-past-the-post winner-take-all allocation for most of its primaries, whereas the Democrats adopted a proportional representation system. Thus John McCain won all of Missouri's delegates by winning, I believe, around 34% of the vote (with Mike Huckabee coming in second with around 31%). Those dumb Democrats, it was suggested, were simply creating a divided party well into June (and beyond?), while John McCain had all those months to preside over a unified party and then take advantage of Democratic ineptitude.

Except, of course, it didn't work out that way.

[snip]

It will be interesting to see what lessons the Republican Party learns from a process that gave them John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Interesting, to say the least.

Sen. Biden vs right-wing tool

(Via TPM)

I love this interview. Partisan hack vs. a rational person.



And the rational person comes out looking good for a change.

You have to wonder if this person wanted to provoke Sen. Biden - because the questions are beyond crazy.

What do you say to the people who are concerned that Barack Obama will want to turn the America into a socialist country much like Sweden?

I mean, here's a better question: what do you say to a person who asks such a stupid question?

He said, he said

(via Neatorama)

Google's put together a web app (In Quotes) to track quotes from Sens. Obama and McCain on leading issues.

Bit of a crapshoot, but interesting nonetheless.

What's the matter with Ohio?

Plenty.

The New Yorker's George Packer dives into the notion that hard hit whites will turn to the Democrats.

...four sociologists at the University of Arizona, led by Lane Kenworthy, relesed a...study [that] followed the voting behavior of the forty-five per cent of white Americans who identify themselves as working class. Mining electoral data from the General Social Survey, they found that the decline in white working-class support for Democrats occurred in one period—from the mid-seventies until the early nineties, with a brief lull in the early eighties—and has remained well below fifty per cent ever since. But they concluded that social issues like abortion, guns, religion, and even (outside the South) race had little to do with the shift. Instead, according to their data, it was based on a judgment that—during years in which industrial jobs went overseas, unions practically vanished, and working-class incomes stagnated—the Democratic Party was no longer much help to them. “Beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s, there was increasing reason for working-class whites to question whether the Democrats were still better than the Republicans at promoting their material well-being,” the study’s authors write. Working-class whites, their fortunes falling, began to embrace the anti-government, low-tax rhetoric of the conservative movement. During Clinton’s Presidency, the downward economic spiral of these Americans was arrested, but by then their identification with the Democrats had eroded. Having earlier moved to the right for economic reasons, the Arizona study concluded, the working class stayed there because of the rising prominence of social issues—Thomas Frank’s [author of What's the matter with Kansas?] argument. But the Democrats fundamentally lost the white working class because these voters no longer believed the Party’s central tenet—that government could restore a sense of economic security.

Ohio's trending blue these days - but I'd Packer is pointing out a host of reasons to not be complacent. Among them:

“Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites,” Kohut wrote. “Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here’s the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.” This statistical glitch is different from the Bradley Effect...

At least on the Pollster chart, a state that leans blue could very well be a toss up.

My money's still on Obama - McCain has a sick amount of electoral ground to make up - but progressives should not expect to coast across the finish line.

(H/t to CJR)

Tilt

Pollster.com brings the pain to the McCain campaign:

That's Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and five other states tilting to blue.

Memo to the McCain campaign: no amount of mud is going to fix this. Start talking sense and you might save your dignity - if not the election.http://pollster.com/

McCain's heath scare plan

Paul Krugman's pegging out just where I'm at on McCain's so-called health care plan:

Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative.

That's the big problem I've had. You want to tear the foundation of our current system down - you might want to have something to replace it with. McCain's saying "trust me, the roof will stay up."

I don't buy it. Under his plan, I'll have to, though.

He's saying I should go out on my own, pay $7,000 out of pocket (plus his inadequate $5,000 credit), AND pay taxes on it. Then, he says things will get better for me.

How exactly? What safeguards will be put in play so that the free market won't bury me when I go out shopping?

I have sleep apnea, you suppose I'm first in line when insurers are cherry picking their customers?

I suppose I'll use my massive leverage of $12,000 worth of premium to convince them to give me what I want. Oh wait - everyone else will have that same leverage.

The unfettered free market is good at a lot of things, but one thing it has consistently sucked at is giving health coverage to sick people who can't afford to pay as they go.

(H/t dday)

Blink

McCain will debate tonight.

(H/t TPM)

This was such a strange thing to do - and the reaction was so negative, you wonder what kind of thinking went into this.

In some alternate universe - McCain might have had a vital role to play. If his party was in the majority, if he was on the Senate banking committee, if he was seen as a leader on - or had any credibility with - economic issues.

In that other reality - you could have created a situation where Sen. Obama would appear at a debate by himself and look foolish for not tending to the crisis at hand.

But in order for that to work, Sen. McCain has to be seen solving the crisis - and that just did not happen. All the discussions were led by other people. The house republicans revolted, and McCain did not or could not rein them in.

So McCain goes to Washington and does not save the day. No deal is in sight, and he's looking at a deadline for debating Sen. Obama. What the hell was he thinking? You stay in Washington, you are clearly a fifth wheel who doesn't want to debate.

McCain will slouch back to Mississippi like he's been repremanded for running off - and Obama looks like the responsible one.

Was this another hipshot, or did the McCain campaign actually think this was a good move?

The one unpardonable sin in America

...is to be bad on television. (At least, according to Dennis Miller).

By that measure - Gov. Sarah Palin is rocketing towards damnation:


(H/t to Glen Greenwald and CBS)

It would be unfair to say this means that Palin is a bubblehead. Plenty of smart people look foolish on television.

But off the cuff brilliance is clearly not her strong suit. If the past two interviews are the measure of her PR value to the McCain campaign - I'd imagine there are some long faces at McCain headquarters.

Huddle?

Okay, I'm just going to rattle off a few items and ask a question.

McCain's suspending his campaign to go to Washington to deal with the economic crisis.
(This is a crisis where the key issues are being discussed in committees he's not on. McCain is not a chairman of any committee. While he wields more influence than a rank and file Senator, his essential role in addressing this crisis will be to cast a vote.)

Much has been made of Gov. Palin being shielded from all questions in her recent press appearances.

And then there's this.

Now, my question is.Where is McCain going to spend the next few days? and Where is Gov. Palin going to spend the next few days?

If there's some high level campaign huddle going on... Enquiring minds want to know.