Category Archives: Politics

Once she loses in November (and perhaps gets impeached as the Governor of Alaska), Palin can get a permanent job on Saturday Night Live. She fits there well, is just as good as the rest of the crew, and we can continue NOT watching the show, just like we have not for years now:

Close Enough To Honest:

CNN lies about ACORN 54 times which is certainly better than, say, a billion.

Nuts About ACORN: Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy’s health.:

As far as “gotcha” stunts go, the right-wing feeding frenzy over the vile vote-fraud treachery of ACORN has yet to yield much fruit. Investigations are indeed under way. But then, they are always under way this time of the year–and as the indefatigable Brad Friedman points out, so what? Evidence of voter-registration wrongdoing is no more a sign of widespread, Obama-sanctioned vote fraud than evidence of minorities being misled and intimidated on Election Day is a sign of official, McCain-sanctioned vote suppression. What’s the real point of turning voter-registration shenanigans into “one of the greatest frauds in voter history”? The object here is not criminal indictments. It’s to undermine voter confidence in the elections system as a whole. John McCain wants to build a better bogeyman, and he needs your help to do it.

McCain Acorn Fears Overblown:

“There’s no evidence that any of these invalid registrations lead to any invalid votes,” said David Becker, project director of the “Make Voting Work” initiative for the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Becker should know: he was a lawyer for the Bush administration until 2005, in the Justice Department’s voting rights section, which was part of the administration’s aggressive anti-vote-fraud effort.
“The Justice Department really made prosecution of voter fraud of this sort a big priority in the first half of this decade, and they really didn’t come up with anything,” he said.
“We’re chasing these ghosts of voter fraud, like chickens without a head,” said Lorraine Minnite, a political science professor at Barnard College in New York who has researched voter fraud and fraud claims for most of the past decade. “I think it’s completely overblown, I think it’s meant to be a distraction.”
“This stuff does not threaten the outcome of the election,” said Minnite. “How many illegal ballots have been cast by people who are fraudulently registered to vote? By my count, it’s zero. I just don’t know of any, I’ve been looking for years for this stuff.”

Why McCain could easily win this:

I propose that the ACORN frenzy has a more important purpose besides just trying to make Obama look dirty. It’s there as a ethical fetish for the huge numbers of Republicans that will be called on to fight citizens trying to exercise their legal right to vote. Every person intimidated, every name fraudulently purged from the rolls—you need to be able to sleep at night after a long day of dismantling our democracy. If you can tell yourself, “They do it, too,” then you feel better. If you can convince yourself that some black or Hispanic voters are voting twice (not happening, by the way), they you can feel justified forcing some not to vote at all.

Ex DOJ Voting Rights Chief: ‘It’s Going to Take a Long Time to Cleanse’ Department:

A former top Department of Justice voting rights official — who once worked with John McCain in defense of the senator’s campaign-finance reform bill — has added his name to the growing chorus that is denouncing the department’s investigation of ACORN as a shameful and inappropriate politicization of Justice along the lines of the US attorney firings.

Supreme Court Hands GOP Loss in Ohio Voting Rights Case:

Now, I’ll be curious to see where the GOP goes from here. There’s not enough time to pursue this case on the merits before the election. So as a practical matter it may kill the case in Ohio entirely. But perhaps more importantly, it puts a stop to the GOP or any other private party gumming up the works over the next 18 days by filing similar cases in courts across the country.

Kathy Sierra, Amanda Marcotte and Danish Jews as ACORN Organizers:

Now, the bullies that resort to physical threats have a new target. It is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Two ACORN offices have been broken into and vandalized. They have received threatening phone calls and emails, including one that wrote that a female organizer “is going to have her life ended”. The phone calls have included some of the worst racial epitaphs and talked about Sen. Obama being lynched. All of this has been turned over to the appropriate authorities.

The first clips in the AVoteForScience YouTube Challenge are being uploaded. Here is my friend and SciBling Jennifer Jacquet:

Get a camera, film yourself, post your video on YouTube and join many others doing the same:

Are you a scientist? Tell the world who you are voting for this year. McCain? Obama? None of the above? Upload your YouTube video explaining who are you, who you are voting for and why you are voting for them. Tag your video with “avoteforscience” and we’ll favorite it.
Scientists and Engineers for America Action Fund and Scienceblogs have teamed up to bring you “A Vote For Science.” Here we will feature videos of scientists explaining who they are voting for and why. If you are a scientist and you would like to explain to the world who you are voting for and why, then upload your video to YouTube and tag it “avoteforscience.” We will feature it here along with videos from well-known scientists from around the country.

Hmmm, I have not done one of these in a few weeks, so if you depend on me for your political information, check under the fold:

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….as Real Life is just as crazy. There is not that much difference between the Thursday’s debate and the SNL sketch, is there?
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Hat-tip

At the time of complicated economic and financial news, I am reminded that the economic system and the financial system are quite separate in this country. The proposed bailout of the financial system only tangentially affects the economy – banks are needed to give out loans, so banks need to have the ability to do so. But the core of the crisis is the housing mortgage problem – shouldn’t the Feds use those $700 billion to pay off all those foreclosures and iffy loans? That would give the banks and lending companies money AND at the same time ensure that people get to keep their houses and have more money to spend on the Main Street (as their monthly payments have already been paid). Naive? Sure, but an idea to mull over.
A couple of weeks ago, I do not remember where and when exactly, someone online asked a question ‘what book you would want the newly elected President to read first?’
I’d have to go with The Divine Right of Capital by Marjorie Kelly. Reading it was an eye-opener!
Here is the key excerpt from the Introduction of the book – now go buy the book and read it carefully!

In an era when stock market wealth has seemed to grow on trees–and trillions have vanished as quickly as falling leaves–it’s an apt time to ask ourselves, where does wealth come from? More precisely, where does the wealth of public corporations come from? Who creates it?
To judge by the current arrangement in corporate America, one might suppose capital creates wealth–which is strange, because a pile of capital sitting there creates nothing. Yet capital providers–stockholders–lay claim to most wealth that public corporations generate. Corporations are believed to exist to maximize returns to shareholders. This is the law of the land, much as the divine right of kings was once the law of the land. In the dominant paradigm of business, it is not in the least controversial. Though it should be. What do shareholders contribute, to justify the extraordinary allegiance they receive? They take risk, we’re told. They put their money on the line, so corporations might grow and prosper. Let’s test the truth of this with a little quiz: Stockholders fund major public corporations–True or false? False. Or, actually, a tiny bit true–but for the most part, massively false. In fact, “investing” dollars don’t go to AT&T but to other speculators. Equity investments reach a public corporation only when new common stock is sold–which for major corporations is a rare event. Among the Dow Jones industrials, many have sold no any new common stock in thirty or fifty years. The stock market works like a used car market, as accounting professor Ralph Estes observes in Tyranny of the Bottom Line. When you buy a 1999 Ford Explorer, the money goes not to Ford but to the previous owner of the car. Ford gets the buyer’s money only when it sells a new car. Similarly, companies get stockholders’ money only when they sell new common stock. According to figures from the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission, in any given year about one in one hundred dollars trading on public markets reaches a corporation. In other words, ninety-nine out of one hundred “invested” dollars are speculative. And the past wasn’t much different. One accounting study of the steel industry examined capital expenditures over the first half of the twentieth century and found that issues of common stock provided only 5 percent of capital.
So what do stockholders contribute, to justify the extraordinary allegiance they receive? Very little. Yet this tiny contribution allows them essentially to install a pipeline and dictate that the corporation’s sole purpose is to funnel wealth into it. The productive risk in building businesses is borne by entrepreneurs and their initial venture investors, who do contribute real investing dollars, to create real wealth. Those who buy stock at sixth or seventh hand, or one-thousandth hand, also take a risk–but it is a risk speculators take among themselves, trying to outwit one another, like gamblers. It has little to do with corporations, except this: public companies are required to provide new chips for the gaming table, into infinity. It’s odd. And it’s connected to a second oddity–that we believe stockholders are the corporation. When we say that a corporation did well, we mean that its shareholders did well. The company’s local community might be devastated by plant closings. Employees might be shouldering a crushing workload. Still we will say, “The corporation did well.” One does not see rising employee income as a measure of corporate success. Indeed, gains to employees are losses to the corporation. And this betrays an unconscious bias: that employees are not really part of the corporation. They have no claim on wealth they create, no say in governance, and no vote for the board of directors. They’re not citizens of corporate society, but subjects. We think of this as the natural law of the market. It’s more accurately the result of the corporate governance structure, which violates market principles. In real markets, everyone scrambles to get what they can, and they keep what they earn. In the construct of the corporation, one group gets what another earns. The oddity of it all is veiled by the incantation of a single, magical word: ownership. Because we say stockholders own corporations, they are permitted to contribute very little, and take quite a lot. What an extraordinary word. One is tempted to recall the comment that Lycophron, an ancient Greek philosopher, made during an early Athenian slave uprising against the aristocracy. “The splendour of noble birth is imaginary,” he said, “and its prerogatives are based upon a mere word.”

Yes, we have a systemic problem. And a philosophical problem. We need to question some of the most essential premises of the way our economic and financial systems are organized.

Last week, Charlotte NC got to see Joe Biden, Michelle Obama and Barack Obama on three separate occasions. The TV (so they tell me) is full of campaign ads by both Obama and McCain. Now, Obama and Biden are appearing together in Greensboro on Saturday. The campaign has been really busy locally, organizing the feet on the ground.
Does this mean that NC is a surprising swing state of 2008? If NC is indicative of any kind of trend and it goes blue, a dozen other red states will go blue as well.
Or perhaps this is the way for Obama to utilize his money advantage and force McCain to spend money defending a red state instead of advertising where it really counts? The whole McCain stunt about “suspension” of the campaign and delay of the debate effort has, among other factors, a goal to provide advantage for McCain to save up some money by forcing Obama to stop out-advertising him for a few days. Especially now that the polls have gone really downhill for McCain.
Thoughts?

An oldie but goodie for the connoisseurs of my long political rants (May 11, 2005):

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So says WIRED:

Barack Obama has established a small but well-regarded inner circle of science advisors that includes a vocal critic of creationism, a Nobel laureate who has championed open-access research, and another laureate who used his prize money to defend academic freedom against the war on terror. Though their influence on the policies of a prospective Obama administration are unknown, they’ve played a prominent role in establishing his science platform to date.
Obama announced his science platform earlier this month in response to questions posed by ScienceDebate2008, a nonpartisan political education group. In response to a Wired Science follow-up, the campaign identified five people who helped draft Obama’s statement: Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health; Gilbert Ommen, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Peter Agre, a Nobel laureate and ardent critic of the Bush administration; NASA researcher Donald Lamb; and Stanford University plant biologist Sharon Long.

What did I see there? Harold Varmus? Yup.

Under the fold:

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Under the fold….

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The Power of Political Misinformation:

As the presidential campaign heats up, intense efforts are underway to debunk rumors and misinformation. Nearly all these efforts rest on the assumption that good information is the antidote to misinformation.
But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people’s minds after it has been debunked — even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information.

Why the Facts Don’t Matter in Politics:

What’s interesting about this data is that so-called “high-information” voters – these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress – weren’t better informed than “low-information” voters. (The sole exception was Republicans who are ranked in the top 10 percent in terms of political information. As Bartels notes, it’s only among these people that “the pull of objective reality begins to become apparent.”) These citizens According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn’t erase partisan bias is that voters tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn’t follow Republican talking points – and Clinton’s deficit reduction didn’t fit the “tax and spend liberal” stereotype – then the information is conveniently ignored. “Voters think that they’re thinking,” Bartels says, “but what they’re really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they’ve already made.” Once we identify with a political party, the world is edited so that it fits with our ideology.

My comment: ‘High-information’ is a quantitative statement: how “much” information they posses. It is not a qualitative statement: is that information worth the paper it’s written on. Thus, there is a difference between being ‘high-information’ (which can also be badly misinformed) and ‘educated’ voters.
But the fact that conservative base believes lies MORE if they are refuted, is the basis of current GOP strategy to blatantly lie and provoke the press to call them on it. Remember that McCain still stands poorly with the base. He needs every hard-core conservative to donate money, GOTV and vote. More the press calls them out on their preposterous statements, more the base will believe those same statements.
The problem for McCain is that his base may not be big enough to win in the key states. The independents, who used to like him, do respond to the media accounts of lies positively and will go away from McCain.
More under the fold:

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