Category Archives: Politics

Felix – Republican, Oscar – Democrat?

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As much as I hate the high political season and all the crap we have to listen to while it’s going on, one positive aspect is that we get to see all kinds of crazy studies done that try to explain the differences between conservatives and liberals.  You know what I mean, the studies that try to explain why conservatives are all anally retentive and wear pajamas to bed while secretly dreaming of themselves playing a part in cheap S&M movies, while on the other hand liberals profess to love everyone but wonder why they have to live cheek to jowell with that smelly immigrant family that just moved in next door. Well, I just stumbled across an article about one such study that explores the households of conservatives and liberals.

The study published in The Journal of Political Psychology doesn’t look at the size of peoples houses, rather it looks at how they keep their house.  In other words they looked at what kind of stuff people have in their houses and what state of order they their stuff in.  Surprise, surprise they found that conservatives are generally neat and orderly while liberals tend to be messier.  Also, they found that liberals keep lots of books and art, while conservatives tend toward calendars, stamps and laundry baskets.

The study also says that conservatives’ living spaces and offices are
well lighted and adorned with flags, especially US flags, and sports
memorabilia.   The article doesn’t mention how the liberals’ offices were lighted or adorned, but I’m imagining lava lamps and posters of Che Guevera.

Not everyone agrees with the findings: 

Political scientist Evan Charney
dismisses links made by the studies between personality and ideology.
"There’s a lot of bad science here," says Charney, a fellow at the
Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy at Duke University.

Well he’s from Duke so what does he know?

Personally I buy these findings.  I consider myself a centrist and my office and living spaces bear that out.  I’m the poster boy for "pile, don’t file" and I’ve been able to live the last four years without a dresser drawer to my name.  I find that piling my folded clothes on a chair next to my bed makes for effective wardrobe selection in the morning.  I have books and magazines stacked next to my bed and desk, but don’t like it when they’re strewn hither and yon.  Yet I wouldn’t know fine art if it bit me in the ass and my musical tastes would make a critic vomit.  Yep, I’d say this study supports my contention that I’m solidly in the middle.

Ringing off the Hook

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The robo-calls hit a fever pitch this weekend.  At last count we’d received six calls on Saturday, but I might have missed some since we have standing orders with the kids to erase all political messages before the message is done playing.  We heard from Republicans and Democrats, but unfortunately we didn’t hear from the candidates themselves.  The Republicans had a sultry sounding woman call us, but since she didn’t end her sentences with the "ya" sound I’m assuming it wasn’t Sarah Palin.  We had two chances to try and figure it out, though, because we heard from the Republicans in both North Carolina and Virginia.  It was awful nice of the Virginia Republicans to call us, but as residents of North Carolina I’m not sure what we can do for them in their "crucial battleground state." 

We also heard from T. Boone Pickens.  Something about his energy doo-dad, but he lost us after his first sentence and he was promptly deleted.  Maybe he’ll call back.  Actually I’m pretty sure he will since we’re one of the seven households in Forsyth County that still has a land line.  If this keeps up we might finally have our impetus to finally dump the wire.

November can’t come soon enough.

Obama Set to Thump McCain?

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As I’ve wearily watched the Presidential and less interesting but consequential Congressional campaigns I’ve begun to wonder why I haven’t seen one really important piece of information reported in the news: how the Presidential race is breaking down by electoral college votes.  All we hear is that Obama or McCain is ahead or behind by some small percentage of the popular vote.  That’s all fine and dandy, but that doesn’t give us an accurate picture of what’s really going on out there.  As we’ve learned in recent elections you can win the popular vote and lose the election, just ask Al Gore, so if you really want to know what’s going on you need to look at the electoral vote breakdown.

So I’m heartened to find that Nate Silver, the Baseball Prospectus genius, has a blog that breaks down the election by electoral votes in addition to the popular vote.  A month before the election he gives Obama an 85.4% chance at winning the election even though he shows that Obama will get 51.4% of the popular vote to McCain’s 47%.  Why the high likelihood of winning for Obama if the popular vote is so close?  Because he projects Obama getting 336 electoral votes to McCain’s 202.  In other words he foresees a butt-whipping.

Personally I think the media is shying away from electoral college projections for the same reason that the pre-game shows in sports take an "anything can happen on any given day" approach to game analysis.  They know that if they admit that the game is likely to be a blowout you’re likely to tune out, and they’d rather be wrong and have you watching than accurate and have you stop watching or reading their "analysis."

North Carolina’s 4th and 5th Districts Could Be Interesting in a Month

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Thank God we only have a little more than a month until "Decision 08" as the tee-vee folks have dubbed this year’s election. That said I think there might be some interesting developments in two of North Carolina’s Congressional districts this year.

I’m beginning to believe that populist Democrat Roy Carter might have a chance at taking out Virginia Foxx.  She’s having a hard time painting him as a typical dirty-word-liberal, and her close ties to the Bush administration aren’t helping her. I’m not sure how the whole Wall Street bailout thing is going to work for her, because the last I heard she might be one of the House Republicans against the deal.  It might end up being a plus for her to be able to say she fought against bailing out the "fat cats on Wall Street", but on the other hand she might be too closely associated with the folks that got the country into this mess.

Over in the NC-4 Democratic incumbent David Price should be a lock in that district, but I’m getting the sense that challenger BJ Lawson might give Price a tougher run than people would imagine.  If nothing else I think Lawson is providing a lesson to other candidates in how to use the web as a campaign tool.  He has a very good blog while Price has a website that looks like something straight out of 1999 without any real substance. A perfect example of how much stronger Lawson’s online presence is, check out his extensive blog post about the government bailout versus the absolute lack of information on Price’s site.  Price doesn’t even have the typical, lame press release which of course makes his site uber-lame.

BTW, the only reason I found Lawson’s blog was because of the bailout post, which showed up in today in one of my Google Alert updates.  Google’s love of blogs is in and of itself a great reason for any candidate to have a blog.  Others would include the ability to communicate directly with constituents, the ability to frame an agenda without relying on mass media, and looking a little less out of it to the increasingly influential Millenial voters.

Back over in my home district I just found Virginia Foxx’s updated web presence which includes a blog and links to online video and pictures.  My hat’s off to her and her campaign, because it’s a vast improvement on her old site.   She’s only posted twice to her blog, but hopefully that will change as we enter the last month of the campaign.  She should check out her fellow Republican over in the NC-4 for a look at how it’s done.  Foxx’s opponent doesn’t have a blog, but he also has online video and links to Facebook and MySpace where he has profiles that look like they need to be fed and watered.

More Wolves

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Fec quotes someone who, like me, doesn’t trust the government’s bailout.  I think he does a better job explaining why:

Hat tip to my excellent commenter, RBM.  From the comments at Sic Semper Tyrannis:

The DK writer who claims to know financial markets says there are
estimates of $400 billion in outstanding private offers for these
securities, but the institutions just don’t feel inclined to sell at a
loss right now, thank you very much. If that is true, the Paulson
scheme is just a scam, a pure and simple scam.

Again, we see the perverse incentives created by this completely
unregulated securities market regime. The paper is held by large
corporations that do not want to take a loss. So they use their crony
capitalist buddies in Washington to scare the public into a premature
bail out, before any bankruptcy, before anyone has to deal with any
losses. Nice work if you can get it.

And from what I read, the miserable incompetent and crook, Paulson
does not even feel inclined to discuss reforms right now (dire
sitation, don’t you know). Therefore, as best I can tell, the very
flawed and perversely functioning (IMH economist’s opinion, very
inefficient!) unregulated mortgage securities financiing system will
continue. Forget about whether this will happen again five years down
the road, how do we know this flawed system will not malfunction again
as the real asset values (housing prices) continue to fall towards a
realistic long run equilibrium. It is crazy, crooked and dangerous.
Unless rich crony welfare is the only objective.

I’m telling you, this thing stinks to high heaven.

Tasty!

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It’s not often you hear a US presidential candidate described as "tasty", but then again this is the first time John McCain’s gotten the nod from his party.  The quote comes from a Brazilian model that McCain had a McFling with when he was a midshipman over 50 years ago:

While John McCain
attended his 50th Naval Academy reunion Saturday, a Brazilian beauty
fondly recalled the affair she had with the young "good kissing"
midshipman she met a half a century ago.

"He was tasty, loving
and romantic," says Maria Gracinda Teixeira de Jesus, 77, a former
beauty queen and dancer, of the young John McCain, whom she met in Rio de Janeiro in 1957.

Foxx Hunt

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I’m no fan of my Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, but I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I live in a Congressional district that would probably throw a parade for Vladimir Putin before it would elect a Democrat.  Well, I might be wrong.  Here’s an interesting post at BlueNC by Frank Eaton in which he points to a poll that shows Foxx leading Democratic opponent Roy Carter by a mere 48-46 in a Public Policy Polling (PPP) poll. He writes the following:

The PPP’s own poll showed a ten point spread (51-41) back in July.
But now, at the start of the true fall campaign, with multiple daily
events across the district, introductory ads on TV and an increasingly
attentive media, people are beginning to understand that there’s
somebody running against Virginia Foxx in the 5th district. His name is
Roy Carter, a fiery mountain populist with a long record of service to
5th district families and their children. This guy could win!

Sometimes it takes the word a while to get to Washington, especially
when it’s coming from a largely rural, inaccurately studied district
like NC-05, which the party structure has habitually forsaken since
redistricting. But listen up: ROY CARTER IS WINNING THIS RACE DOWN
HERE. And he’ll continue to win this race until Virginia Foxx opens up
her war chest and starts running those crappy $150,000 TV ads in steady
rotation on Fox News here in the district.

SHE CAN BE STOPPED FOR VERY LITTLE MONEY. All that’s standing
between North Carolina and an easy Democratic pick-up in the Congress
is this continued reticence on the part of the Democratic
leadership–at both the state and national levels–to look at the true
dynamics of the race:

-Soft support for Virginia Foxx among republican and unaffiliated
voters indicated by low approval ratings for her and the current
administration.

-increased consciousness of the economic realities in the district and a desire for change.

-A compelling Democratic challenger who is overseeing an energized, creative, dynamic campaign.

Even though Eaton is not an objective source I think he makes some pretty good points.  Foxx is closely aligned with Bush and hence vulnerable to negative association.  I’m sure she has a stranglehold on the hard core Republicans in her district, but Carter presents a problem for her with centrists because he’s not perceived as some sort of "intellectual elite" or "tree hugger" Democrat.  He has a lot of qualities that residents of this meat and potatoes district are attracted to, and he won’t be easily dismissed with the usual "liberal elite" smear campaigns.

On the other hand Eaton’s also right that Foxx has a deep war chest and when she starts opening up the media campaigns Carter could be thumped if he doesn’t get similar air time, which means he needs a financial boost from somewhere. 

Hat tip to Ed Cone for the lead.

I’m So Important That John McCain’s Called Me, Twice!

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Man, I’m on cloud nine.  My stature has climbed to the point that John McCain, THE John McCain, called me to tell me what he’s up to and why I should vote for him for el Presidente.  I wasn’t home so he left a message, and he wanted to speak with me so much that he called back again ten minutes later and left another message.  I tell you what he’s so good that his second message wasn’t almost identical to his first message.  It was almost as if he was reading from a script.

Since he couldn’t get hold of me Senor McCain is going to mail me something, I think an absentee ballot, that he said I should receive in the next week or so. I can hardly wait!

Why They Assume We’re Stupid

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You ever wonder why politicians and their "strategists" continue to use tactics and schemes that have only the thinnest connection to truth or reality?  I’ll tell you why; it’s because there are enough people ready to believe the BS that it’s worth their while to do it.  In other words, enough of us are dumb or naive enough to believe it that they know they’ll lock up enough votes to make it worth their time and effort to sling this hash.

You wonder what I’m talking about?  Right now the easy examples involve Barack Obama.  It’s not news that some of the Fox-wannabes and Limbaugh lites have been playing with his middle name (Hussein) for effect, or that they’re playing to the xenophobic segment of the population by painting him as some sort of Muslim mole in the supposedly Christian US.  Now some dope has concocted an email that purports to be from syndicated columnist Maureen Dowd and floats all kinds of crazy accusations about Obama’s online fundraising coming mostly from places in the Middle East, like Iran and Saudi Arabia.  The email has been debunked, but I guarantee you that those that want to believe it will, and they will spread it like a virus.

Why do I think this is true?  Because I’ve been in my barbershop and heard a guy say, in all seriousness, that if Obama wins we’ll be kneeling toward Mecca in no time.  I’ve heard, repeatedly, that ours is a Christian nation and that a Muslim should not be elected president.  It’s tempting to argue with people about the accuracy of calling our nation a Christian nation (I think it would be news to the Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, atheist and "other" citizens of the United States), to explain that many of our founding fathers were not Christian (try explaining what a Deist is to someone), but when you get right down to it these folks don’t care.  They are predisposed to believe this crap, and they swallow it whole and then regurgitate it to anyone who will listen.

And no this phenomenon is not unique to the red-meat conservatives.  You can bet that there is and will continue to be plenty of flimsy poop being flung at McCain that the left wingnuts will gladly wallow in and share.  And that my friend is the problem.  Both sides know that we are bored by the "issues", that we’re drawn like moths to a flame to stories that prove that the one we oppose is somehow alien, is not one of us, and thus must be feared and beaten at all costs.  And the media?  They love it because they get to sell advertising, so their job is to simply facilitate the process and highlight the ludicrous.

All of this is nothing new and will continue long after the elections in November.  Thankfully, though, the election will at least end the high political "season" and we can get back to pondering things like Janet Jackson’s nipple.