Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
I’ve always thought that safety and freedom were somewhat incompatible goals. You can have a very safe society, but next to no rights. (A police state.) Or you can go the opposite way, and have a very free society, one in which no one can stop me from detonating nuclear bombs. But there’s a middle ground, I think, where we have a good deal of freedom, but are also pretty safe.
I’ve always thought that airports were a good example of starting to give up too much freedom to get a little safety. While I’m certainly not eager to give up safety, I could do with a slightly less-strict set of policies in airports.
But here’s an even better example. A town in Arkansas is drawing criticism for what seems to be a non-stop curfew, in which anyone on the streets is stopped and investigated. (It’s not terribly clear to me what’s meant by the curfew, though: I think of a curfew as it being illegal to be in public during a certain time, so a 24/7 curfew would basically mean you couldn’t leave your house. And they kind of suggest that, but it seems people are also going on with their daily lives?)
Is it safe? Very much so, it seems. Violence is way down, and they’ve made lots of arrests. But would you want to live there, where walking to the store was cause for the police to detain you? (The telling quote is, “The citizens deserve peace, that some infringement on constitutional rights is OK…”)
I stumbled across HuffPo’s FundRace, a searchable database of public campaign contributions. (I don’t recall the threshold, but campaign donations above a certain amount must be reported. I’ve given less than $50 to Obama, and thus am not listed, but donations for a few hundred dollars and more do show up.)
You can search by ZIP code, address, name, profession, or employer. (So there is no ambiguity: “Employer” lists the employer of the person who made a donation; it does not mean that the employer was involved in the donation. It’s just part of the reporting.) Some of the more notable things I’ve turned up:
- Those listing “Apple” (the new, proper name for what was once “Apple Computer”) gave $6,856 to Republicans (9 donors), and $40,421 to Democrats (48 donors). Microsoft was only slightly more balanced, with $97,281 to Republicans (95 people) and $436,236 to Democrats (514 people). Google had $51,327 from Republicans (42), and $337,265 from Democrats (268). Also Vint Cerf, whose accomplishments include things like founding the Internet (at least, moreso than anyone else can claim), works for Google, and was the biggest donor there.
- George Bush Sr. hasn’t given to any candidates, but has given to numerous PACs, including Sununu’s!
- William Clinton, whose occupation is listed as “Former President,” gave $2,300 to Obama (in “Q2 2008″). Somewhat amusingly, another William Clinton in VA, whose occupation and employer are blank, gave $2,300 to McCain. (A third William Clinton, a CA attorney, gave $500 to Obama.) Hillary Clinton gave $2,300 to Obama (also in “Q2 2008″). Barack Obama hasn’t made any contributions, but Michelle Obama did give $399 to her husband’s campaign. (That’s all?)
- They weren’t joking about Hollywood being liberal. Those listing “Actor” as a profession include:
- Ben Stiller of Los Angeles, $6,900 to Hillary
- Bette Midler (who I’m pretty sure is an actress, not actor) of Nashville, $6,900 to Hillary.
- Chevy Chase, of Bedford, NY, $4,600 to Hillary.
- Ben Affleck of Santa Monica, CA, $4,600 to Obama.
- Michael Douglas, Universal City, CA, $4,600 to Christopher Dodd.
- Will Smith, Los Angeles, $4,600, Obama.
- Matt Damon, Santa Monica, $4,600, Obama.
- Thomas Hanks, Beverly Hills, $2,300 for Hillary.
- Samuel Jackson, Los Angeles, $2,300 for Obama.
- Samuel Waterson [sic] of NYC (better known as Jack McCoy), $2,300 for Obama.
- Morgan Freeman of NYC, $2,300 to Obama.
- Adam Sandler of Manchester, NH (!), $2,100 to Giuliani (!!).
- Ben Stein, Malibu, CA, $800 to McCain
- Omar Epps (better known as Dr. Foreman), Los Angeles, $2,300, Obama.
- Actresses is about the same; I’ll let you read it yourself.
- Those listing their occupation as “Priest” collectively gave $35,351 to the Republicans (51 priests), and $57,222 to the Democrats (99 priests).
- “Rabbi” isn’t even fair: $18,735 to the Republicans, $115,187 to the Democrats.
- “Pastor” is the first combination I’ve seen that gives more to the Republicans. America’s pastors gave $205,731 to the Republicans, but only $113,984 to the Democrats.
- “Minister”s gave $187,799 to the Republicans, and $310,476 to the Democrats.
- There are actually more than a dozen bishops who have donated money; $7,118 to the Republicans, $11,650 to the Democrats. V. Gene Robinson, of NH fame, gave $500 to Obama. No one lists “Cardinal” as their occupation, and unsurprisingly, there were no Popes in America that contributed to campaigns.
- 101 people list their occupation as “Captain,” but it’s almost an even split: $32,330 to the Republicans, $30,423 to the Democrats. (Incidentally, “Captain” covers everything from military members to pilots, executives (?) to maritime people…)
- I was surprised to see that those listing their employer as “US Army” gave more to Democrats than Republicans: $186,724 to the Republicans, but $252,664 to the Democrats. “US Marine Corps” was almost 2:1 in favor of the Republicans, though it’s got only a couple dozen people listed.
- “Firefighter” is quite close. $61,759 from 100 people to the Republicans, and $58,995 to the Democrats from 111 people. Thus slightly more firefighters donated to the Democratic party, but Republican firefighters donated slightly more.
- “Police Officer” is quite Republican; $139,229 to the Republicans, and $91,622 to the Democrats.
- You’ve got red on you [video, only tangentially related]. 5 people listing “Deceased” as their profession collectively gave $7,754 to the Republicans, while only 4 “Deceased” people collectively gave $4,352 to the Democrats. I love the guy at the bottom of the list, who posthumously donated $2 to the RNC.
- One person lists his occupation as “Prisoner.” He gave $250 to John Kerry in 2004.
- One person lists her occupation as “Stripper.” She gave $278 to Ron Paul.
- Of 57 postmasters, 17 gave a net $4,840 to the Republicans, and 30 gave a combined $21,435 to the Democrats. Also, an amusing amount list their address as a PO Box.
- All 5 of America’s campaign-donating butchers gave their blood-money to the Republicans, a net $6,347.
- Only 2 nuclear physicists donated to campaigns; $400 to Mike Gravel and $250 to the RNC.
- America’s only campaign-contributing juggler gave $500 to the DNCs.
- Two out of three clowns are Democrats. (Umm….) Also, the only Republican clown gave his money in 2004.
- The guy who lists his occupation as “Santa” and his employer as “North Pole” lives in New Hampshire. (No one lists their occupation as “Tooth Fairy.”
- 19 people list “God” as their employer: 10 Republicans ($5,460) and 9 Democrats ($2,809). No one who made a campaign contribution in 2004 or 2008 lists “Satan” as their employer.
- Hairdressers who donate to campaigns are overwhelmingly Democrats.
- No Astronauts donated to campaigns in 2004 or 2008.
- Two psychics donated. Both Democrats. Think about that for a minute.
- Three masseuses donated, also all to Democrats. We’re a more comfortable party.
- 143 plumbers collectively gave $91,364 to the Republicans, while only 99 plumbers donated to the Democrats ($56,635).
- Cowboys favor Republicans, though not by as much as you might think.
- Most of the Red Sox management donate to the Democrats; Curt Schilling is the only player on the list, and he donated $2,300 to McCain.
- Almost everyone on the Yankees gives to Republicans.
- “Professional Athlete” doesn’t turn up many names I recognize, besides the aforementioned Curt Schilling. The exception is Peyton Manning, who gave $2,300 to Fred Thompson.
- Those employed by the NBA have given exclusively to Democrats.
- Seamstresses have a tendency to go Democrat, though not overwhelmingly.
- Innkeepers, though, are overwhelmingly Democrat-givers.
- Beekeepers (all 9 of them) are almost split down the middle.
I think my research is done. I’ll go with the party with fewer zombie contributors, and the backing of two out of three clowns, and the majority of seamstresses. Just don’t tell any butchers. Really, though, what did it for me was seeing who the psychics were supporting.
Have you heard about McCain’s new ad? It’s on his main page, though there seems to be no way to direct-link to it. Somewhat bizarrely, it starts off with video of throngs of cheering Obama supporters, and calls him the biggest celebrity in the world, flashing images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. (By the way, Paris Hilton apparently had no knowledge she was being used in the ad; using one’s likeness in commercials is generally illegal, though I have no clue if political campaigns are exempted.)
It then goes on to say, “But is he ready to lead?,” before attacking Obama for opposing offshore drilling (I’ll save that rant for another time), but, more significantly, talks about his plan to raise taxes on electricity. Yipes, that’s bad! Raising taxes now? On electricity?!
There’s one problem, though. It’s not at all true.
Newsweek has a good article explaining where McCain’s campaign got the quote about Obama wanting to raise taxes on electricity. In an interview, he was asked, “Have you considered other funding sources, say taxing emerging energy forms, for example, say a penny per kilowatt hour on wind energy?” You can read the quote for yourself, but his answer was essentially that taxing renewable energy was an awful idea; taxing ‘dirty’ energy would make more sense, but even that isn’t the real solution to funding education. And yet, if you quote just one sentence from the middle with no context, you can make it seem like he’s saying that we need to raise taxes on electricity. Except that he was making the exact opposite point.
When Obama’s campaign criticized the ad as baseless FUD, McCain then went on to accuse Obama of “playing the race card.”
Do you remember standardized tests, especially in grade school and middle school, where they’d have you read a passage of text and you’d have to identify the “main idea” of the writing? Most of the choices were things that were in the passage, but only one of them was plausibly the main idea, whereas the rest were trivial details.
My takeaway from this WaPo* article? Phthalates is a really funny word, but virtually impossible to pronounce. You can make the “Ffff” sound, and the “Thhhh” sound, but there needs to be a vowel in between. The two sounds can’t be put together. It’d be like starting a word with “qb”—a bunch of valid letters strung together to form something nonsensical. (Realistically, I imagine it’s pronounced “Fih-thal-ates,” but note that the pronunciation adds in a vowel sound that’s not actually there.) If you attempt to pronounce the word, be careful that you don’t spit on anyone.
So what is the main idea of the article?
(a) Congress is considering banning phthalates, a toxic chemical in children’s toys.
(b) The move is seen as evidence of a shifting tide, swinging to the side of consumers and away from manufacturers.
(c) Phthalates is a really funny word.
(d) President Bush has said he opposes the bill banning poisonous children’s toys.
Hint: remember the old “When in doubt, guess C” adage about multiple-choice questions? They say that for a very good reason.
* I spent 5 whole days in Washington. I’m allowed to use the “WaPo” abbreviation, because I’m an insider now.
I keep hearing people on the right reiterating that “the surge worked,” so that withdrawing from Iraq would be surrendering. To me, this is a non sequitur.
First of all, there’s the simple question of why we’re at war. We went in as a pre-emptive strike against Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. We took him out, and although we never did find evidence to support that he was building up his WMD arsenal, we did take out a cruel tryant. I’m a little unclear why we’re still there: the Iraqi threat has been neutralized, and Iraq’s got a sovereign government in place. Al Queda keeps coming to try to attack our troops, but the fact that our troops have become targets is hardly a reason to stay in Iraq.
Now here’s the thing! If the Iraqi government wants us to stay, I’m all for allowing our volunteer troops to keep helping them. But it’s being widely reported that they want us out. While I trust this was an unfortunate accident, it suggests that Iraq has wanted us to leave for some time: “It also bolstered calls from Iraqi politicians to pressure the American military to leave Iraq after this year, when a United Nations mandate expires, unless the United States agrees to permit its soldiers to be subject to criminal prosecution under Iraqi law for attacks on civilians.”
I’d ask: if we’re at war, who are we at war with? It’s the Iraq War, but we’re supposed to be helping Iraq. We’ve taken out Saddam, and most of the violence is directed at our troops: staying in Iraq isn’t going to fix anything.
It’s not “surrendering” or “giving up” to recognize that you achieved your goal a long time ago, and that all you’re doing now is making things worse. It sounds great to try to attack your opponent for that, but it’s simply not true.
Rapper Nas has a new song, Black President [obscene lyrics, NSFW]. I don’t give it high marks musically, but it’s interesting to me for two reasons. The first is that rap music actually addressing contemporary issues is rare. (Though it’s not entirely unheard of: Changes, for example.) The seconds is that the song is about Obama.
As I said, don’t set your standards too high if you listen to it, and don’t even waste your time watching the video, which seems to just be a montage of images of Nas. Do take care to read the lyrics carefully: a lot of people seem to miss the leading “They said…” and interpret the song as being against Obama. And the “Although it seems heaven-sent, we ain’t ready to see a black President” is actually from Tupac’s Changes, not an assertion that Nas is making.
What troubles me about the song:
Whats the black pres thinking on election night,
Is it how can i protect my life? Protect my wife? Protect my rights?
…
KKK is like what the f—, loading they guns up, loading up mine too,
Ready to ride ’cause I’m riding with my crew, he dies we die too
I read an article a while ago, citing absolutely no evidence, saying that there’s a persistent belief among African-Americans that Obama would be assassinated if elected. Hillary played into it, too, if inadvertently, both when some speaker in NH at a campaign event made a comment to the effect of, “Some have compared Obama to JFK, but let’s not forget what happened to him” (which Hillary denounced), but also when she said the same thing about Bobby Kennedy to explain why she was staying the race when it was clear she couldn’t win. It’s creepy how often it comes up, and then you add in the creepy amount of parallels to Lincoln…
And I find this snippet interesting, too:
Gotta do what we gotta do,
We ain’t got no governors comin’ through to help,
Anything we need, we gotta do for self,
New improved JFK on the way…
You may recall Kanye West’s spontaneous George Bush doesn’t care about black people remark during a Red Cross fundraiser, which then led to the (highly profane, thus NSFW) video, George Bush Don’t Like Black People song. While I’m not necessarily supporting the claim that Bush was overtly racist, I think it’s historically significant: not only was the whole Katrina event horribly mismanaged (the lyrics to the song include, “If it’d had been Connecticut, he’d have been there twice as fast”), but the whole deal with shooting looters (who were inevitably black) makes it entirely understandable that African-Americans may have felt a tad bit alienated.
Again, I’m hardly in agreement with everything put forth in the song, but I think it’s culturally significant. It’s not an advertisement or a campaign song, but just his perspective on the state of affairs. And I think it was interesting to look at.
As I research candidates, I keep coming across a past proposed (U.S.) Constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m hardly for flag desecration, and would be appalled if any American did so. But do people not see the irony that the flag represents our freedoms as Americans, especially our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, and thus freedom of expression? To protect the flag from trampling, people are trying to trample the First Amendment. And I wouldn’t vote for anyone who values the flag itself more highly than what it stands for.
Wikipedia lists the times it’s come up as a Congressional vote, which is frighteningly often. There was H.J.RES.12 (”House Joint Resolution 12″) in 2007, introduced by PA’s John Murtha, with 70 consponsors: no local politicians cosponsored it, but Tom Tancredo and Marilyn Musgrave both supported it. It had a parallel in the Senate, but with only one sponsor. Neither bill appears to have come to a vote.
In the previous (109th) Congress, House Joint Res. 10 passed 286-130; the vote rolecall is here indicating that Charlie Bass and Jeb Bradley both voted for it. Its parallel, Senate Joint Res. 12, failed in the Senate, though it failed narrowly at 66-34; it’s not clear to me exactly what it needed, but it seems like it may have been one vote shy of passing with 2/3. Rollcall for that vote is here: Judd Gregg, John McCain, Harry Reid (!), and John Sununu all voted for it.
Do you guys recall Obama’s “fist bump” with his wife when he clinched the nomination? It was a big hit with younger Obama fans.
It was not a big fan with E.D. Hill, a Fox News anchor who called it a “terrorist fist jab,” as I was just reading about. That’s not the real concern, though. I just rolled my eyes at that.
What really concerns me is the “news contributor” Liz Trotta who suggested that Obama should be assassinated.
Are you serious?! How the hell is that acceptable? Can you imagine how outaged everyone would be if a CNN anchor joked that someone should shoot McCain? It would be incredibly inappropriate.
The last paper I ever wrote in college was for my Power and Propaganda course, and addressed the propaganda being hurled against Obama. One thing I addressed was that many of the criticisms of him were blatant lies. It’d be like if I started posting here that John McCain said, “Thank God for the Nazis!” and President Bush met with McCain and used “the N-word” to refer to Obama. Total fabrications as part of a smear campaign.
The problem is that they work. I’m going from memory, but if memory serves me correctly, 13% of people in a recent poll said that they thought Obama was a Muslim. Soon it was being reported that he was sworn in on the Qu’ran, too. Of course, the Muslim rumors would soon be contradicted by trying to label him racist because his pastor said some crazy things, and the fact that he was sworn in on the Qu’ran would be refuted by photographs showing him with his hand on the Bible when being sworn in.
There was also the big row over the photograph of him “refusing to say the pledge,” with some versions of the chain letter or website alleging that he refuses to do it for religion reasons; one even said that he didn’t know the words. In actuality, Obama was singing the national anthem, as a video of the event shows.
There’s another one about him hiding his birth certificate because he’s not actually a citizen. (If you want to get technical, John McCain is the one who wasn’t born in the US… Though it’d be asinine to argue that he’s not a US citizen because he was born on a US military base.)
The Obama campaign has finally launched Fight the Smears, a page refuting the utter falsehoods against him. The latest one seems to be alleging a videotape of Michelle Obama using the word “whitey.” Frankly, I could see this being done in a non-racist manner, but it’s a moot point, because none of the <sarcasm>reputable</sarcasm> sources claiming to have seen / possessing the tape have released it, and because one person has some pointed allegations of exactly where the tape was filmed, most of which seem fabricated.
It’s totally cool with me if you’d prefer to vote for McCain. (Well, I’d still disagree, but I’d at least respect that you had a rational difference of opinion.) Obama isn’t a Muslim, terrorist, or unpatriotic. John McCain isn’t a rapist and he doesn’t eat babies for breakfast. In a time when the truth is so sorely missing, can we please try to stick to reality this election?
While looking at job postings on Craiglist, I somehow ended up at Craig Newmark’s personal blog. (He founded Craigslist.) He linked to this YouTube video.
For some reason I’m reminded of Hillary’s tall tale of ducking sniper fire. I respect McCain as a decorated soldier and a Senator who understands bipartanship, but after eight years of the Commander in Chief misleading* us about Iraq, I’d really prefer to not elect a president who will do more of the same.
* Whether it was intentional lies or him being fed false information I’m not sure, but either way, we were misled.
