November 5, 2008

What the Referendums Tell Us

Filed under: elections — maha @ 9:37 am

There’s one sad news item today, which is that it appears California’s Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, has passed. I don’t know if it’s been officially called yet, but the numbers don’t look good. Last night voters also passed anti-gay marriage amendments in Arizona and Florida. Arkansas voted to ban adoption and foster parenting by gays.

On the plus side, yesterday three states had initiatives on the ballots that would have limited abortion rights, and all of them failed.

  • Colorado voters defeated a referendum that would have criminalized abortion and some forms of birth control by defining human life as beginning at the moment of conception. This failed big; a not-final tally had the votes at 74% to 26% opposed.
  • South Dakota defeated a measure that would have banned abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when there was severe risk to the life of the mother. This was a slightly tweaked version of another initiative that South Dakota rejected two years ago. The not-final tally is 55% to 45%, which seems pretty decisive to me.
  • California’s parental-notification referendum also is failing, although I don’t think the results are official as of this morning.

I’m not 100 percent certain this is true, but I have read that, since Roe v. Wade, no state referendum limiting abortion rights has ever passed. I’d also like to point out that yesterday’s election was between a candidate with a 100 percent approval rating from NARAL and one with a 0 percent approval rating from NARAL.

Notice who won. Notice who won big and easily.

The message that I hope is not lost on either party is that it’s time to stop catering to the Fetus People. I’m sure there are states and localities in which being opposed to reproductive rights can still help a candidate win elections. But those are exceptions, not the rule. It appears to me that an enormous majority of voters, including voters in conservative states like South Dakota, are either mostly pro-choice or are more concerned about other issues.

In short, the anti-reproductive rights movement has no political clout except in the most conservative localities. And in those localities, conservatives probably don’t need the Fetus People to win elections.

The message to Democrats is that they don’t have to be afraid of the anti-choice vote. Say it loud — we’re pro-choice, and proud. And the message to Republicans is that being against abortion is not the wedge they thought it was. In fact, on a national level, being opposed to abortion rights seems a huge liability.

We’ve all heard the story that John McCain wanted to choose Joe Lieberman as his running mate and was overruled, entirely because Lieberman is pro-choice. Another veep candidate who might have helped McCain, at least in Pennsylvania, is Tom Ridge, also pro-choice. Sarah Palin may have “energized the base,” who one assumes would have voted for McCain anyway, but she drove away independents and conservative Dems. She probably didn’t lose the election for McCain by herself, but she sure as hell didn’t help him. I think a McCain-Lieberman or McCain-Ridge ticket would have been taken much more seriously by more voters.

But the GOP feels compelled to cater to the anti-reproductive rights movement, and so it gave away whatever chance it had to win the presidential election.

It’s time for politicians of both parties to tell the Fetus People to take their hate and misogyny and get lost.

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November 4, 2008

Tonight: Open Thread

Filed under: elections — maha @ 6:47 pm

I’m going to be out tonight for return-watching. Feel free to discuss until I get back, hopefully not too late tonight.

Update: I’m home, tired but happy. My daughter has a liveblog here.

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Is This Discriminatory?

Filed under: Religion — maha @ 6:36 pm



Maggie Gallagher is shocked that people would make this nasty ad about the Mormons. As Andy Sullivan points out, Mormons have put considerable money and effort to pass Proposition 8 in California, which would ban same sex marriage. Mormons are not the only people to support Prop 8, however, so I don’t think it was necessary to call them out.

I’m of two minds on this. If a religious faction is trying to change laws to suit its doctrines, then I think it’d better be prepared to take hits from people who disagree with them. This is about political activity, not religious activity. If the ad were criticizing Mormon doctrine that would be a different matter.

Put another way, Mormons have a right to practice whatever religion they want to practice. But when they try to impose their religious views on everyone through law, then they should be expected to be treated like a political faction, not a religion.

As I said, I’m of two minds on this. I don’t like to see a religious group demonized or caricatured. But when a religious organization is operating in the political sphere, criticizing its political activities is not necessarily anti-religious bigotry.

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Howling in a Well-Appointed Wilderness

Filed under: conservatism, liberalism and progressivism — maha @ 9:14 am

The day has dawned, folks. Nothing left to do but vote. I suggest voting as early in the day as possible.

There is a lot of good commentary available today, none of which was written by David Brooks. Brooks has outdone himself in teh stupid today, warning us Obama supporters that we can’t imagine the deprivation that awaits us.

His [Obama’s] upscale, post-boomer cohort has rallied behind him with unalloyed fervor. Major college newspapers have endorsed him at a rate of 63 to 1. The upscale educated class — from the universities, the media, the law and the financial centers — has financed his $600 million campaign (which relied on big-dollar donations even more heavily than George W. Bush’s 2004 effort). This cohort will soon become the ruling class.

And the irony is that they will be confronted by the problem for which they have the least experience and for which they are the least prepared: the problem of scarcity.

Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest.

Most of the post-boomers I know live extremely frugally, often because they are still paying off college loans and because the basic costs of living eats their entire income. The Gen Y post-boomers in particular are the first generation in living memory with no expectation that they look forward to lives of growing wealth.

However, Brooks imagines that, because Obama’s supporters tend to be more educated than McCain’s, Obama supporters are all well-to-do.

Barack Obama is a child of the 1960s. His mother was born only five years earlier than Hillary Clinton. For people in Obama’s generation, the great disruption had already occurred by the time they hit adulthood. Theirs is a generation of consolidation and neo-traditionalism — a generation of sunscreen and bicycle helmets, more anxious about parenthood than anything else.

Obama is not only a member of this temperate generation, but of its most educated segment. He has lived nearly his entire adult life within a few miles of one or another of the country’s top 10 universities.

I think the “great disruption” Brooks refers to is the 1960s.

Certainly there are plenty of young and affluent people who are keenly interested in sunscreen and bicycle helmets. But Brooks assumes the young folks supporting Obama have no idea what scarcity is and have not a care in the world regarding their financial futures.

This, I think, tells us a lot about why the Right (of which Brooks is a member and spear carrier, even though he pretends not to be) has no clue how to appeal to most voters now. In all their screaming about “liberal elitists” they failed to notice that the leadership and intelligentsia (a word I use loosely) of the Right is as spoiled, as insulated, and as elitist as any group of people since the court of Louis XIV.

Brooks concludes,

We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.

Actually there is a plan for it, which is why smart young liberals (and some of us old ones, too) have worked so hard to take the government away from the Right so we can implement it. It is unfortunate that the gross mismanagement of the Bush Administration has left us with few resources to carry out the plan, but most of us liberal know what has to be done.

We need to stop shoveling money to the already wealthy, to war contractors, to special interests, and instead invest in America. We need to repair infrastructure. We need to invest in education, in new technology, in new industries. We need to stop treating American workers as “cost,” as an expendable resource that can be easily replaced in the third world. We need to relieve both individuals and business of the crushing costs of feeding the health insurance racket.

We need to realize that America has finite resources, and we must set priorities and make cost effective use of those resources for the benefit of the greater good — all of the people of the U.S. — and not to enhance profits that benefit only a select few.

We need to remember that government exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

It’s the Right that doesn’t get that, Mr. Brooks. And that’s why you’ll be losing a lot of elections today.

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November 3, 2008

Have You Seen This?

Filed under: Obama-Biden — maha @ 9:50 pm


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Sad News

Filed under: Obama-Biden — maha @ 5:44 pm

The Washington Post is reporting that Barack Obama’s maternal grandmother died today.

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Don’t Forget to Breathe

Filed under: Republican Party, conservatism, Democratic Party, McCain-Palin, Obama-Biden — maha @ 9:38 am

The final pre-election polls show Obama in the lead. I would have said “comfortably” in the lead, but you know us lefties. We always expect a cartoon anvil to drop out of the sky and flatten us.

The Right is still running a signature right-wing campaign. They’ve got the illegal immigrant aunt, more 1960s terrorist ties, claims that Obama will destroy entire industries/ban Christianity/start another holocaust. A vote for Obama is a choice to go to hell.

Good thing the election is tomorrow, or in a few more days they’d be claiming Obama wants to eat your baby. With fava beans and a nice chianti.

Michael Tomasky theorizes why the smears aren’t working the way they used to:

That coalition of affinity that Reagan created between right and middle, Bush has put asunder. His failures have made the average, apolitical American as distrustful of conservatism as he or she once was of liberalism - indeed somewhat more so, since the memory of conservative failure is fresher in the mind. This is a new context. Many experts have yet to grasp it. Certain elements within the mainstream media haven’t quite got it yet. And clearly some liberals just can’t believe that it might be the case.

This is not to say that negative campaigning will disappear as of tomorrow. But it is to observe that political contexts change, and eras end. I’m still suspicious enough to use the conditional tense, but by Wednesday morning even the most paranoid liberals may be forced to accept that fact.

I believe we are looking at an enormous political re-aliagnment, bigger than 1980. More like 1933. But these things don’t begin and end neatly. The re-alignment has been going on for a while — at least since Katrina — and I don’t expect it to end tomorrow. I’ll have more thoughts on that later.

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November 2, 2008

Stand Up

Filed under: Obama-Biden — maha @ 5:06 pm


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What’d I Say?

Filed under: News Media — maha @ 4:01 pm

Recently I predicted that before the inauguration the wingnut punditocracy will claim the Obama Administration is a failure. Remember that? Well, I did. Anyway, Jonah Goldberg is ahead of the curve. He’s not even waiting for the bleeping election.

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The Audacity of Desperation

Filed under: Republican Party, conservatism, blogging — maha @ 7:51 am

Some wingnut found a Weather Underground newsletter from 1975 (I didn’t know the Weather Underground was still around in 1975), and documents that the words “organizers,” “communities,” “audacity,” and “socialism” appeared in close proximity in the same paragraph.

Wow! This proves that Barack Obama is a Marxist! Oh, wait …

This paragraph from the newsletter actually frightened one of the commenters –

… the system itself is inhuman, and socialism is a real alternative; the energy crisis is the fault of Rockefeller and the oil companies, not the Arab people; unemployment is caused by capitalism not “illegal aliens” stealing jobs; war in Indochina or the Mideast is part of the problem, not the solution; political and social action can change things.

I’m not entirely sure why the wingnut found this disturbing. All of these issues were issues in 1975, as I remember. The Yom Kippur was was in 1973 and was still on peoples’ minds in 1975. Also in 1973 OPEC enacted an oil embargo on the U.S., which caused a lot of aggravation. In 1975 we had just pried ourselves out of a war in Indochina, but there was an ongoing war in Lebanon. Most of the issues we are facing now have been going on for a long time.

This post and the commenters also bring up the rumor that Bill Ayers must have ghost-written one of Barack Obama’s books, apparently based on the observation they both speak English and use some of the same words. The Times of London tells us that Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah, are connecting the dots. And if they can’t find dots to connect, they make some.

Fox contacted Dr. Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Oxford who wrote a software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favorite words and phrases. Fox offered Millican $10,000 to prove that Ayers wrote Obama’s books.

Millican took a preliminary look and found the charges “very implausible”. A deal was agreed for more detailed research but when Millican said the results had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved, interest waned.

Millican said: “I thought it was extremely unlikely that we would get a positive result. It is the sort of thing where people make claims after seeing a few crude similarities and go overboard on them.” He said Fox gave him the impression that Cannon had got “cold feet about it being seen to be funded by the Republicans”.

Cannon insisted, however, that he was not interested in making an issue of Obama’s memoir “even if it were scientifically proven” to be someone else’s work.

Of course not. The $10,000 was just to satisfy idle curiosity.

Update: Alert blogger Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns & Money shows us the Obama-Ayers-Weather Underground conspiracy is broader than even I had imagined.

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the term “audacity” also appears no less than twelve times in chapter seven alone of US Army Field Manual 3-0. This can only mean that the Weather Underground has already successfully seized control of the United States Army!!!!!11!!1! Has anyone investigated the connections between David Petraeus and Bill Ayers? No one is safe!!!

Further, the Weather Underground had a circular logo. So does Obama. So does Mozilla Firefox.

Is there no end to this?

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