Category: America

It’s nineteen hours into the new year, and I’ve received our first present from the far right fringe hate groups. In a plastic bag, tied with a white twist-tie and weighted with a piece of slightly red-tinged granite, a flier greeted me when I took the dogs out tonight:

Don’t Have Sex With Blacks
Avoid AIDS!

The flier then showed a mug shot of a young black man, and the names and counties of three accused black “sexual predators” who “lied about being HIV positive and had sex with dozens of White Women!” (emphasis in the original). The flier was signed by the National Alliance (note my disapproving vote attribute in the link). Googling the text led me to this file.

I frankly feel sick to my stomach. And I don’t know what recourse I have. The leaflet text is protected by the First Amendment; a similar offense in Princeton was prosecuted as littering last year. A similar incident was reported at Rice in 2000. I suppose I should take some comfort in seeing that in four years the racist minds behind this haven’t been able to come up with any additional attacks, but I can’t.

The only constructive action I can think of is to talk to other people in the community and figure out how to coordinate a response.

From Mathew Gross, GoMainStream.org, an attempt to revitalize the conservation movement. The organization is a partnership between Robert Kennedy, Jr, Gross, and Bobby Sundeen. From Matt’s email:

We formed GoMainStream.org because more than 90% of Americans hold our values in common — clean air, clean water, open lands — yet 40% think that ”most environmental activists don’t really care about people.“

We formed GoMainStream because the corporate plunderers have hijacked our public lands and the public process.

And we formed GoMainStream because they’ve hijacked our language. They call polluting the air “Clear Skies” — and they call it “development” and “access” when they lock Americans out of the public lands that we hike, hunt, fish and love.

We’re going to change that. And we’re going to change it by building a new coalition from the bottom-up — an organization that helps Americans take action and that works to reframe the debate about the future of our country.

We’re going to do it by connecting hunters fighting to maintain access to elk habitat with suburbanites combating urban sprawl.

Because conservation is not an issue of right or left, or urban versus rural, or red versus blue.

It’s an issue of who we are as Americans.

I think that this sort of action is an important first step in reversing the tide of Newspeak that continues to impede progressive efforts in the US—note the careful use of “conservation” rather than “environmentalism” and the nod toward the Bush administration’s successful avoidance of broad public outrage through careful language use. In fact, the only thing I can think of that I would change in the message is some of Gross’s language regarding “corporate plunderers.” He’s emailing to his base, but we learned in 2004 that if you stir up your base using inflammatory language, they’re not the only ones who end up getting mad. As commenters on my site have noted over and over again, the same fighting words that put a fire in the belly of liberals tend to make potentially sympathetic but conservative-leaning undecideds hot under the collar.

Oliver Willis engages on a one-man branding campaign for the Democratic Party. I think he’s really onto something here. The Dems have tried to be so many things to so many people for so long, the core message has gotten diluted. This is a good way to bring it back—combinations of evocation of famous Democrats past with enunciation of core values. I think, along those lines, that this might be my favorite one:

Though this one is also good for a laugh:

Another nice touch, the images are explicitly Creative Commons licensed (By-NC-SA). And Oliver has put the template up for reuse..

I have a bunch of pages stuck open in my aggregator that I haven’t posted yet because I didn’t feel right about them. They’re all about alleged or actual errors, improprieties, or other issues with the voting in this presidential election. Today Scott Rosenberg at Salon posted what I feel is the more balanced perspective on this: if there was vote fraud, we‘ll report it, but the people who continue to insist that the election was stolen are beginning to sound like the folks who think Iraq had WMDs and caused 9/11. With that perspective, I can comment on these links and then move on—unless, of course, the vote stealing allegations are proven.

A lot of the articles start out with statistical analyses of the variances between exit polls and actual reported results, such as Blue Lemur’s Odds of Bush gaining by 4 percent in all exit polling states 1 in 50,000; Evoting/paper variance not found to be significant. This article sums up a lot of the threads going around as follows: It seems like Bush got an average gain of 4.15% between exit polling and actual vote tallies across the 16 states where exit polls were taken. That seems pretty high, and you can make a probability assessment that it’s pretty unlikely, but the article is careful to point out that the differences between exit polls and vote counts were higher in some paper ballot states than in e-voting states.

The authors of the paper want the raw exit poll data. This strikes me as scary, since that data has to be weighted against the actual population before it’s any good and if you’re going to go into the raw data and start weighting it yourself, you can make it tell pretty much any story. The only thing this approach buys is the ability to recreate the weightings that the polling organizations actually used, then second guess their methodology. Nice, but what I would really want is the actual vote counts.

Unfortunately, for every careful but ultimately futile article like that at Blue Lemur, you get a dozen roundups of anecdote and speculation, such as the one at bellacio.org: Too many voting “irregularities” to be coincidence. To which I reply, How many voting irregularities would constitute coincidence? And what is the chance of a voting irregularity in 2004, when we’ve all been sensitized by the 2000 election, compared with earlier days when no one would dream to ask the question? Don’t get me wrong, some of the errors, like the 4,000 extra Bush voters in Franklin County, Ohio, are pretty egregious. But some of the other observations, like the one at Commondreams.org about the correlation between voting for Bush and the minimum wage hike, seem pretty thin.

The frustrating thing about the obsession with the election being stolen is that the general tinfoilhatdom is obscuring some real issues, like the ease of hacking e-voting systems and optical scan computers. That’s where we need to put our time and energy, not re-fighting November 2 for four years.

Thankfully, Fury adds another dollop of balance by exploring the use of tin-foil hat as signifier for conspiracy theorist, including a full survey of current usage. Thank God for the academy.

Today: Colin Powell. Also William Safire, from a position in the other camp. And then there are people being let go from the CIA for being “disloyal.”

Let me make this clear. I, unlike the administration, believe in science. I believe in “prove it to me.” I believe that even in murky situations like interpreting intelligence reports—especially in those situations—how you proceed should be about whose interpretation best fits reality, not whether the analyst is a “soft leaker,” “liberal Democrat,” or a person who has been “obstructing the president’s agenda.”

This makes the disturbing New Yorker article about how selected intelligence reports that fit the Administration’s rosy scenario were fasttracked to the President, while less rosy reports were suppressed, look like child’s play.

Let’s not even get into appointing Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor during the worst failures of national security in history, to the State Department. She failed, folks. She tried to tell the nation, and the 9/11 commission, and did tell the president, that an August 2001 memo entitled “Al Qaeda determined to strike in America” meant no imminent danger to the country. She should be fired, she should be brought down, not rewarded. But then I said I wasn’t going to get into this.

…original letters, that is. Three original letters, plus a bunch of people xeroxing one of them, to levy a $1.2 million fine against a network. For showing a bachelorette and a bachelor party—tamed down, undoubtedly, for TV.

Nice reporting by Jeff Jarvis. Now, I agree with there being some accountability for outlets that have broadcast licenses, but I feel that upholding things like, oh, equal time for political broadcasts is a hell of a lot more important to enforce than whether someone removes a garter belt with his teeth or gets spanked on network TV.

Greenehouse Effect: He’s Ba-a-a-a-ack! Greg points to a petition to draft Howard Dean for chairmanship of the DNC. Not a bad idea. He was the only Democratic candidate that got lots of people passionate; he understood the importance of rural voters; and the party chairmanship is a hell of a lot better place for him than running for public office.

By the way, Greg’s headline could easily refer to his own blog. Glad to have you back, Greg.

NY Times: Attorney General and Commerce Secretary Resign from Cabinet. Can it be? Are we at long last free of this encumbrance on our liberties? Might we once again see breasts at Justice Department press conferences? Might we once again see due process in criminal cases?

Well, probably not the last one. But now we’ll find out how many of the abuses of the Patriot Act are coming from Ashcroft the man and how many are inherent in the law. Unless of course we get a more conservative attorney general.

Boston Globe: Sen. Edwards’ wife Elizabeth diagnosed with breast cancer. Our thoughts and prayers go to Elizabeth and the Edwards as they face this.

While I still await the results from Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa, I’m not optimistic. Sorry, Matt, but I don’t see a lot of hope out of this election; if we couldn’t beat this administration in a fair fight after the last four years, we need some serious overhauling. I’m thinking about what I learned last night about the last four years, and the next four.

First: it’s pretty clear that the rhetoric about “election stealing,” regardless of what happened in 2000, does not apply to the 2004 election—at least not yet. Turnout increased on both sides and so far their side had more than ours.

Second, the country as a whole is much more conservative—socially—than I think anyone on the left dreamed. Gone are illusions of isolated backwaters of Bible-thumping bigotry; with results like these elsewhere in the country, it’s clear that there was a major group of voters for whom protecting God from the Democrats was much more important than worrying about nuances of the reasoning to invade Iraq, the economic health of the country, or the lives of our boys.

Third, I think this election dramatically showed the strengths and limitations of the blogosphere in the political process. While information was flowing freely, there was a whole class of issues and voters that never showed up on the blogosphere’s radar, but which turned out to be pivotal. (See my previous post about blind spots in the blogosphere.)

Fourth, while we were making logical arguments, people were falling into a reality distortion bubble in which Iraq was involved in 9/11 and had WMDs, John Kerry shot himself to get medals that he then threw away, and the rest of the world likes us for our efforts in Iraq. Not just a few people—a lot of people. We may want to start thinking how we reach people who have voluntarily disconnected from reality but who vote in large numbers—or, failing that, make sure that the people who are still living in reality have all the facts.

Fifth, we may just have been handed 2008, given that the president now has to clean up his own Iraq mess and deal with his own budget deficit. But we can’t win an election if we handle it like we did this one, and we won’t win it if we don’t start shifting the ground against the “loyalty oath” people and start making people think.

Finally, there is some comfort in seeing that I’m not alone in my anger: Fury, AKMA, Doc, and Larry Lessig all make interesting points.

As I write this, Bush is up over Kerry either 197–188 (CNN) or 207–199 (MSNBC). But that hasn’t budged in hours. Plus, of course, the news that Florida won’t have its vast oceans of absentee ballots counted until Thursday.

Oy. Anyone else watching this want to compare notes?

And what the hell did happen to the youth vote?

Lisa and I voted at about 4:30 pm. There was no line at our polling place, but the Scantron indicated that I was ballot # 1067 for the day. Now we’re sitting (after cooking dinner: chicken filets sautéed in lemon, butter and parsley (a la Siena) and risotto with prosciutto and peas, with a French Chardonnay—sue me) watching the election returns and waiting for the miracle.

(Incidentally, that would be my addition to the election mix tapes that are floating around.)

Shout out to Fury for putting Fury’s money and time where Fury’s mouth is (ah, the challenges of pronouns for an anonymous blog!).

Note: even voters in blue states have trouble voting. See George’s abbreviated story.

First, if you haven’t voted yet, go do it. Lisa and I are headed out later this afternoon once she finishes her conference calls.

Second, if you have trouble voting: Election Protection Hotline: 1-866-MYVOTE1 to report problems, 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683) for immediate legal assistance.

Third, quick compilation from around the Internet of useful links:

• CNN Electoral Map
• The ever-invaluable Electoral Vote Predictor (currently with yesterday’s polls) and its mirrors: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
• Interpreting the above data: Mystery Pollster
• Ohio fraud watch blogs: Village Voice, Ohio Voter Suppression News
• Commentary: Josh Marshall, Oliver Willis
• More commentary: NewDonkey.com
• And, if you are local to Boston, here’s information about the party in Copley Square for Kerry’s speech tonight; he’s expected to take the stage about 11:30, after headlining performances from Jon Bon Jovi, Black Eyed Peas, Sheryl Crow, James Taylor, Carole King, and maybe even Don Henley (do not, however, discourage you from trying to crash the party. Remember, Clinton/Gore used that damned Fleetwood Mac song, and I hear their Election Night bashes were still lots of fun). The preparations for this speech, incidentally, are what I photographed last Thursday with George, not preparations for the Red Sox parade; I’ll update the photo captions shortly.

With everything over but the voting (one hopes), I’d like to put a personal thanks out to a lot of people on the Internet for making this, the most important election ever (with the possible exception of the election of 1860), also the most discussed, most debated, most opinionated, and maybe most informed election ever. Special thanks to the Electoral Vote Predictor site and its Votemaster, newly revealed to be Andrew Tanenbaum; Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo and Oliver Willis; the Instapundit, anchoring the right hand side; Salon’s coverage; Eric Olsen and Blogcritics (especially this post); Tony Pierce for uncommon sense; Dave for focusing attention early on the role of blogs and the Internet in politics; Greg for being the deep-thinking gadfly he’s always been; Fury for coming in late but strong; Wonkette for keeping it funny; and a host of other folks I’ve forgotten but linked to before.

In case anyone has missed it, I endorse John Kerry for President, because he lives in the reality-based world:

Because he doesn’t have people on his side who so dramatically misunderstand the history of America that they try to claim the country was founded on principles that those who would seek to keep church out of state and vice versa are anti-American and anti-Christian. (Thanks to Christian Ethics Today for debunking this point of view, which has claimed several people I know);

Because he will admit it when he screws up;

Because he won’t need rigged voting machines built by a committed campaign contributor to get into office;

Because he will get elected in spite of help from the liberal media, who were going to run a slanted 45-minute attack against him for free but refused to run the ad of a bunch of Iraq veterans who are calling BS on the administration;

Because he will get elected in spite of attempts from the GOP to interfere with voters in Ohio, and Ohio, and Wisconsin, and Florida, and elsewhere;

Because his campaign cares about people who don’t have cars (see page 2);

Because his campaign wants people who think, not people who take loyalty oaths;

Because his campaign hasn’t promised not to use the greatest tragedy that has ever hit our country for political purposes, and then turned around and done it.