palin's on the three c's: choice, climate change, creationism

All Palin, all weekend, I suppose. I mean, I suppose you could rewatch YouTube videos of the Democratic National Convention. Or go outside. It is really nice outside, by the way, and the farmers' market has all sorts of delicious fruit (blackberries, raspberries, nectarines, peaches, tomatoes... yum).

But in case you still need a political fix this lovely Saturday, here's three things to know about Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin:

1) Palin is anti-choice, opposing abortion even in the case of rape or incest.

2) Palin is a climate change denier; she doesn't think global warming is human-caused (or maybe she does, but is too much in the pocket of Big Oil to say otherwise).

3) Palin wants to ignore the First Amendment separation of church and state by teaching creationism alongside evolution, a practice the Supreme Court has ruled as an unconstitutional injection of religion into public education.

Oh yeah, and Palin hates polar bears because they get in the way of drilling for oil.

a matter of scale

Obama announced Biden as his pick at a rally in front of the Old Statehouse in Springfield, Illinois, that not only recalled the announcement of Obama's historic candidacy last year, but recalled that other great American President and Illinoisian, Abraham Lincoln.

McCain announced Palin as his pick in... a high school gym.

The end.

Oh, and this (the announcement today, on a Friday, the slowest news day of the week) is sort of painful to watch the whole way through, but really quite hilarious:

who is sarah palin?

AP just broke the story early this morning that McCain is not picking Mitt, nor Joementum, nor Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Nope, he's picking Sarah.

Who?

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

More to come, but the blogosphere needs to get on top of this fast and start framing her, because the mainstream media is going to eat it up. This could be bad. Blogs seem to be responding decently... we'll have to wait and see which of the many critiques will actually stick. My money is on McCain/Palin having shot themselves in the foot by taking "experience" off the table.

update: It's begun.

dKos says she's like Quayle (pretty face, empty suit) and a right-wing pick:

Palin is also a an ideologue, on choice, on the environment, on energy -- all the way down the line. This an ideological pick in an election where self-identified Republicans are a dying breed and Democratic self-identification is skyrocketing. McCain has abandoned any notion of playing for the center. He's looking to shore up his right flank and hoping that the Evangelical Right can somehow drag McCain over the line.

Politico reports that she doesn't even know what the VP does:

In an interview just a month ago, she dissed the job, saying it didn’t seem “productive.”

In fact, she said she doesn’t know what the vice president does.

Larry Kudlow of CNBC’s “Kudlow & Co.” asked her about the possibility of becoming McCain's ticket mate.
Palin replied: “As for that VP talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day? I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an administration.

Muckraking? OpenLeft points out--but doesn't harp on--her major scandal, wherein she is suspected of having tried to use her power as governor to get an ex-brother-in-law fired from the state troopers.

Pro-Big Oil? Think Progress has the video that Palin's big on drilling in ANWR, although that's a bit of a mixed bag (polls show that most Americans want more drilling):

On CNN this morning, conservative Bill Bennett said Palin is “best known for her advocacy of drilling, drilling for oil in ANWR in the state of Alaska.”

Taking Experience Off the Table: Most bloggers (Josh Marshall at TPM, for example) are commenting that since Palin only has 2 years of experience as governor and is only 44 years old, McCain has basically taken the "experience" argument off the table. From Marshall:

John McCain's central and best argument in this campaign is that Barack Obama simply lacks the experience to be President of the United States. And now John McCain, who is a cancer survivor who turns 72 years old today, is picking a vice presidential nominee who has been governor of a small state for less than two years and prior to that was mayor of a town with roughly one-twenty-seventh of the citizens that Barack Obama represented when he was a state senator in Illinois.

Whatever you think of Barack Obama's qualifications to be President, Palin is manifestly less qualified. And that undermines the central premise of McCain's campaign.

Andrew Sullivan puts it thusly:

What this means, it seems to me, is that McCain has decided he cannot win without Clinton Democrats, and this is his attempt to win them over. He has decided that he cannot win on the experience card, so he is trying to pick the change card. Palin's record on climate change is certainly impressive - and she seems a charming, capable person. She is certainly a different kind of pick for a Southern-based GOP. But McCain will be the oldest first term president in history with a history of health concerns. If America is concerned that Obama isn't ready, how could anyone say Palin is?

I think that's right on... and good news for Obama/Biden. If McCain is seriously going to try to run against Obama on change and charisma, I think we know who's going to win this election.

Sullivan also suggests that this may be taking the "commander-in-chief" argument off the table:

The first criterion for a veep - and I'm simply repeating a truism here - is that they are ready to take over at a moment's notice. That's especially true when you have a candidate as old as McCain. That's more than especially true when we are at war, in an era of astonishingly difficult challenges, when the next president could be grappling with war in the Middle East or a catastrophic terror attack at home. Under those circumstances, we could have a former Miss Alaska with two terms under her belt as governor. Now compare McCain's pick with Obama's: a man with solid foreign policy experience, six terms in Washington and real relationships with leaders across the globe.

[...]

She may be a fine person, but she's my age, she has zero Washington experience, and no foreign policy expertise whatsoever.

McCain has just told us how seriously he takes the war we are in. Not seriously at all.

For the record, she was not Miss Alaska; she was the runner-up.

Also at Atlantic Monthly, Marc Ambinder promotes a reader's comment to the same effect:

I thought you might like to know that under the heading of "Sarah Palin on Foreign Policy" at the On The Issue site for her, this is what's listed:

"No issue stance yet recorded by OnTheIssues.org."

i take back everything bad i've ever said about biden

Well, not really. But that was an extraordinary speech! In case you missed it, here it is in three parts, thanks to our friends at YouTube.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:

ca to build largest solar plants ever

From the NYT:

Companies will build two solar power plants in California that together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest such plant today, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale.

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store.

The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants, which will use photovoltaic technology to turn sunlight directly into electricity, to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants, which use the sun’s heat to boil water.

“These market-leading projects we have in California are something that can be extrapolated around the world,” Jennifer Zerwer, a spokeswoman for the utility, said. “It’s a milestone.”

California continues to lead the way in fighting global warming and innovation for green technologies. We also got news last week that Silicon Valley behemoth Google, through its philanthropic arm of Google.org, is investing $10m into an innovative geothermal renewable energy project. On the Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS):

The technology differs from “traditional” geothermal in that rather than exploiting existing wells of earthbound steam and hot water, EGS drills deep — miles down — to access layers of heated granite that exist underfoot everywhere on the planet. Water can be circulated downward for heating, and then upward to drive turbines and generate electricity.

While $10m is a drop in the bucket for the kind of serious funding these projects actually need to become significant sources of energy, is sends a clear signal to both the government and other philanthropic donors that these innovations in new green technologies are viable and key to a sustainable planet.

at what price gold?

This disturbing story in the LAT today challenges preconceptions of what the Olympics, and winning Gold, really means:

The only mother on China's team, Xian Dongmei, told reporters after she won her gold medal in judo that she had not seen her 18-month-old daughter in one year, monitoring the girl's growth only by webcam. Another gold medalist, weightlifter Cao Lei, was kept in such seclusion training for the Olympics that she wasn't told her mother was dying. She found out only after she had missed the funeral.

Chen Ruolin, a 15-year-old diver, was ordered to skip dinner for one year to keep her body sharp as a razor slicing into the water. The girl weighs 66 pounds.

[...]

But the costs are higher than many Westerners would tolerate. China is suspected of using 14-year-old gymnasts and falsifying their ages to get around a rule designed to protect girls' health during the transition into puberty. In sports where younger athletes are permitted, they often take risks that elsewhere would be unacceptable.

"It's too dangerous," diving coach Zhou Jihong said to a Chinese newspaper, speaking of the extreme diet that kept his 15-year-old athlete at 66 pounds. "She has superhuman willpower."

Chinese athletes, particularly women, tend to be much thinner than their Western counterparts. Guo Jingjing, a gold medalist in diving who weighs 108 pounds, pointed out as much rather ungraciously when she referred to competitor Blythe Hartley as "the fat Canadian." The 5-foot-5 Hartley weighs 123 pounds.

Guo, 27, suffers from health problems related to diving and is said to have such bad eyesight she can barely see the diving board. It is a common hazard for Chinese divers, who are recruited as young as 6.

"Divers who start at an early age before the eye is fully developed have great chance for injuries," said Li Fenglian, doctor for the Chinese national diving team. She published a study last year reporting that 26 of 184 divers on the team had retina damage.

This is by no means a critique reserved for China; though of varying degrees, many nations around the world have taken drastic measures to produce Olympic champions. The IOC needs to take a hard look at itself and figure out what the Olympics are really about. Is it about the spirit of competition, of the human form and triumph over adversity, or is it about winning at any cost and the sacrifice of youth on the altar of nationalistic pride?

micro-structural greening case study: college dining hall trays

Going "green" really requires large institutions to make changes that while on an individual household level would result in only small resource savings, can create very significant differences in one fell swoop. That is not to say that individual household behavior changes don't make a difference. For example, changing the ten or so lightbulbs in your apartment (the average house has 40) from conventional incandescents to CFLs will save you 70% or more on energy usage; the reduction in carbon output if you ran your lights for 24/7 all year is only 587 lbs. of carbon per year per lightbulb, or about 10,000 lbs. of carbon across 20 lightbulbs. By comparison, the average American car expels 10,000 lbs. of carbon per year, so every larger household switching to CFLs entirely would offset the carbon output of their two cars. Of course, most people don't run their lightbulbs non-stop, so it would probably take 4 or 5 households changing CFLs to offset a single car's carbon output.

That being said, changes result in more drastic positive savings when brought to the institutional level. Case in point, the water and food (and thus energy) saved when universities decide to do something as simple as getting rid of cafeteria trays:

It's too soon to measure cost savings nationwide. But five times more energy and water are consumed in dining halls than any other square foot on college campuses, said Sodexo spokeswoman Monica Zimmer.

"So if a college is looking to go 'green,' they need to start looking in the dining facility," Zimmer said.

Georgia Tech, enrollment 18,000, has saved 3,000 gallons of water per day without trays, she said.

The 50,000-student University of Florida estimates it will save 470,000 gallons annually. At the 2,000-student University of Maine at Farmington, which went trayless in February 2007, the tally is 288,000 gallons, said Aramark spokesman Dave Gargione.

[...]

Another Aramark study of 186,000 meals served at 25 institutions found that when trays weren't used, food waste per person was reduced 25% to 30%.

At Glenville's Mollohan's Restaurant, one of two places to eat on campus, food waste has been reduced from three, five-gallon buckets to just one per day, said Stephen Shattuck, Aramark's food service director at Glenville.

College activists take note: you can make a huge difference by pressuring your university administration to make these simply, cost-effective changes. This of course expands beyond just food trays to other energy-intensive practices, such as the use of low-energy lights discussed above. Over 10 years, Stanford University has saved 150 million kWh by retrofitting the campus to more energy-efficient systems, for a reduction of around 11,250 tons--or 22.5 million pounds--of carbon each year.

dnc day 1: an anthem for change

revisiting mandates, and on underinsurance

The NYT reported early this summer on a study by the Urban Institute which found that the Massachusetts health care reform plan, which is pursuing universality of insurance coverage via individual mandates, has reduced the proportion of uninsured adults by nearly half after its first year of operation, and contrary to national trends has increased employer-based insurance (nationally, employer-based insurance coverage has been dropping significantly).

Massachusetts residents were required to obtain insurance beginning in 2007, and state subsidies were provided on a sliding scale to make policies affordable for low-income residents. The 86,000 residents who did not comply faced modest first-year tax penalties of $219. The penalties will stiffen this year.

Mr. Kingsdale said that more than 350,000 of the estimated 600,000 residents who were uninsured before the program began had since gained coverage. Exemptions were granted to about 60,000 people who demonstrated that they could not afford even subsidized insurance. Enrollment in the subsidized plans has exceeded projections, and lawmakers and Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, are negotiating a tobacco-tax increase to help sustain the program.

The Urban Institute survey found that 7 percent of Massachusetts adults ages 18 to 64 remained uninsured in the fall of 2007, compared with 13 percent in 2006. Those still uninsured are largely male, low-income and healthy, and a third of them said they did not know health insurance was now mandatory.

For adults with family incomes of less than three times the federal poverty level, or $66,600 for a family of four, the uninsured dropped to 13 percent from 24 percent. For those earning more, the rate dropped to 3 percent from 5 percent.

So, positive changes in terms of getting people insurance coverage, but not necessarily a perfect system. 60,000 exemptions out of previously 600,000 uninsured residents is a full 10%, a not insignificant number of folks falling into that infamous category of the middle-class who can't afford insurance even when it's subsidized. So it boils down to this, which we've long-known but now have the actual evidence from Massachusetts proving the theory true: private-insurance-based mandates will dramatically reduced the number of uninsured, but will unfairly squeeze a significant number of working families who fall between the rock of mandates and the hard place of affordability. As I've argued before, mandates can work, theoretically, but will need to meet (at least) four criteria:

(1) hav[e] an extremely progressive scale of subsidies, something along the lines of guaranteeing that no one [...] is paying more than 3 to 5% of their net income in total out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles, premiums and co-pays, (2) having serious and intensive regulation of the health insurance industry, including requiring regulator approval for any premium rate increase, analogous to the strongest state auto insurance industry regulation, (3) creation of a public insurance plan, [...] that Americans can opt into rather than purchasing private insurance, and (4) [and have a policy where] those failing to purchase insurance should not be fined, but rather should be automatically enrolled in the public plan, with the option to switch to a private plan (usually annually).

But all that is just a question of "getting an insurance card into everyone's hand," a small part of what we're discovering is a much larger problem. The issue of those who are still unable to purchase private insurance under a mandate is, perhaps, an indicator of a larger problem of continuing to rely on the private insurance industry for our health care: the "Plight of the Underinsured," as a NYT editorial labeled the problem:

It is well known, by now, that almost 50 million Americans lacked health insurance for all or part of last year. What is less well known is that 25 million Americans who did have health insurance often found it pitifully inadequate when a medical crisis hit. They were only marginally better off than those who had no coverage at all.

[...]

The survey found that some 22 million adults with health coverage all year still spent a large chunk of their incomes — at least 10 percent for middle-class families — for out-of-pocket medical expenses. Another 3.4 million were saddled with high deductibles that would cause financial problems if they became ill.

According to the Health Affairs report that spurred the NYT piece, when you combine the uninsured with the underinsured, you find that 42% of U.S. adults are not being served by our current health care industry. That is a massive failure, and a strong signal that continuing reliance on employer-sponsored private insurance (ESI) may not be a feasible foundation for truly effective health system reform. For a solution of how to deal with this problem incrementally, see #3 of my four criteria above.

dealing with new york city rent

someecards.com is hilarious, in case you haven't browsed them before. I also like this one:

tactical philanthropy and the (in)efficiencies of progressive foundation giving

At Future Majority, Mike discusses the new blog Tactical Philanthropy and the importance of reconsidering the way the progressive non-profit industry is run, quoting from this key post:

I think the concept of “net grants” is a powerful one and something foundations should understand when they think about their grant making. Realize too that the costs of the nonprofit that actually obtains the grant are not the only relevant costs. If 100 nonprofits spend $1,000 each to pursue a $100,000 grant, they the net grant would be $0. Nada. Nothing gained. In effect the foundation has just taken $1,000 away from the 99 nonprofits that failed to get the grant and delivered the money to the winning grantee.

I'm not a development person, but this is quite an interesting thing to think about, both for those in foundations and those seeking money from them.

wind: silver bullet of climate change/unemployment?

As Congressional Democrats appear poised to give in on off-shore drilling that won't result in any new oil for 18 years, and then would be only a third as efficient in reducing dependence on foreign oil as everyone properly inflating their tires, it is perhaps time for them to re-watch An Inconvenient Truth. The solutions to cheap and renewable, carbon-neutral energy sources are already here, and on top of that, would create half a million new jobs:

The wind-driven future within our grasp can be found in the recent Department of Energy report, called "20% Wind Energy by 2030." [...] This effort would only add about 50 cents per month per household, or under 2 cents a day.

For that small amount of money, the country would get the remarkable benefits listed at the beginning. The carbon dioxide savings alone would come to 7.6 billion metric tons cumulatively by 2030, at which point wind would be cutting annual emissions 825 million metric tons a year. That is the equivalent in emissions reduction of taking two-thirds of all U.S. passenger vehicles off the road.

The study notes that "few realize that electricity generation accounts for nearly half of all water withdrawals in the nation." By 2030, wind would be cutting water consumption by 450 billion gallons a year, of which 150 billion gallons a year would be saved in the arid Western states, where water is relatively scarce -- and poised to get even scarcer thanks to climate change. And on top of that, we get half a million jobs, of which nearly a third are high-wage workers directly employed in the industry.

It's also just cheaper:

Analysis for the California Public Utility Commission puts the cost of power from new nuclear plants at 15 cents per kWh. It also puts the cost of coal (without carbon capture and storage) at more than 10 cents/kWh. That's a major reason why, since 2000, Europe has added 47 GW of new wind energy [@ 4 to 8 cents/kWh], but only 9.6 GW of coal and a mere 1.2 GW of nuclear.

Obama's Olympic ad on the potential for a new green economic sector is right on:


Meanwhile, scientists at MIT have apparently figured out how to make solar power panels act more like plants by actually storing the sun's energy for use during nighttime. The result? With the right investments, our homes could be entirely powered by solar energy within 10 years:

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," Barber said in a statement. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production, thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

Nocera said he's hopeful that within 10 years, people will no longer power their homes using electricity-by-wire from a central source. Instead, homeowners will be able to power their homes with solar power during daylight hours and use this new energy-storage method for electricity at night.

Watch it again.

biden: it could be worse

That's the message I think the Obama campaign sent with the choice of Sen. Joe Biden (DE). "Old, white foreign policy guy" isn't exactly groundbreaking in what is supposed to be a trailblazing campaign. Here are some quick first thoughts:

"It could have been worse": Who else was on the short list? Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (KS), arguably the most progressive on the short list, is a terrible speaker. That being said, I'm not sure if poor presentation outweighs Biden's tendency to make "gaffes" (a.k.a., either off-color or racist statements, depending on who you ask). Then you had Sen. Evan Bayh (IN), one of the most vocal and ardent proponents of the Iraq War. And Gov. Tim Kaine (VA). Young, fresh, a perfect pair for the campaign of change... and anti-choice. Oh yeah, and for some reason Speaker Pelosi mentioned Rep. Chet Edwards (TX), and the Obama campaign did her a solid by putting his name on a short list he was never part of. Seriously, the guy is like the most conservative Representative in Congress. Speaking of which, it could have been a Republican. Or Bloomberg.

"Obama doesn't need any help": If Obama thought he needed help to win, he would have picked Kaine, who would help not just in Virginia, but as a fiery bulldog in populist-leaning states. Sen. Claire McCaskill would have helped in Missouri, and also in much of the Midwest. Gov. Brian Schweitzer would have helped in Montana, an unlikely swing state but one that his popularity alone could have won, as well as much of the Mountain West that is becoming the new electoral key for the Democrats (if Colorado goes for Obama on election night, the thing is likely in the bag). But Joe Biden? The guy is from Delaware, a state with a Democratic governor and two Democratic Senators (but strangely a Republican at-large Congressman). There's some nonsense about Biden helping in Florida, but I doubt anyone really believes that; if Obama wins Florida this year, it will be due to the changing dynamics of the South Florida Latino vote, not Biden schmoozing with New Yorker retirees. Biden is no help on the electoral map; I'd also argue he's no help with supposedly shoring up Obama's "weaknesses." He has "foreign policy experience," but he voted for the war, which actually takes away Obama's great line about not only needing to be ready to pick up the red phone at 2am, but also needing the judgment to make the right call. Biden did not make the right call.

"Obama will govern like Bill Clinton": If you loved the Clinton years, you're in for a treat. Not just the Biden pick, but the last three months have given us a pretty good idea that the Obama Administration will be quite similar to the Clinton Administration in their style and tactics. A pick like Sebelius, or more cleverly, Brian Schweitzer (a netroots darling), would have been a great dog-whistle to progressives and liberals that Obama had to run this campaign the way he was running it to win, but really cared about progressive values. Alternately, a pick like Bayh would show that he was very weak and susceptible to the age-old Republican attacks of being "too liberal," and that he would be on his heels for his administration reacting to threats rather than pushing his own agenda. But Biden shows us that Obama has his own agenda, and it is similar to that of former President Clinton: compromise as a goal, rather than a process. Putting someone on the ticket who voted for the war contradicts the purity of Obama's stance as the only candidate you had the sense to realize the war was a bad idea from the beginning. But it also says, "hey, look, some of you thought the war was a good idea, and while I told you so, I'm willing to let you back into the fold to fix the problem you started." It doesn't require the other side to compromise, admit fault or otherwise cede any ground; all is forgiven, and by the way, we'll also compromise and give you some of what you want. It is a good strategy for micro-successes, but not for large-scale change. Don't expect universal health care anytime soon, is all I'm saying.

Finally, I just want to say, damn you Barack for making me go back on my word and do another post on Joe Biden. I promised I would not do another after he made these ridiculous comments and I figured we had heard the last of him:

The senator then pounced on a member’s announcement that the club would hold its annual Christmas party at the state Department of Archives and History where members could view the original copy of the state’s Articles of Secession.

Biden asked, “Where else could I go to a Rotary Club where (for a) Christmas party the highlight is looking at the Articles?”

Biden was on a roll.

Delaware, he noted, was a “slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”

Oh yeah, that reminds me, I almost forgot one more thing this pick says:

"Obama will forgive you for your racism": Presidential candidates say a lot of stupid things, but very rarely do the stupid things they say actually rise to the level of racism or other bigotry. But Biden has been impressive in this arena, not only scoring that quote above that basically bragged about how there was slavery in Delaware, but also talking about how Obama is "clean" and "articulate" (unlike Jesse Jackson, who apparently mumbles and doesn't bathe). Oh yeah, and this one from 2006:

"You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

But don't worry. All is forgiven.

mark nabong's 2007 gulc section 3 commencement speech

Poor video quality, riddled with inside jokes, and over a year late, but it deserves promotion. Note to anyone graduating from any program: choose a stand-up comedian as your student speaker. It will be the best decision you made during your entire program.

sen. daniel akaka for vp

Pandagon's Jesse Taylor lays it out, and makes me wonder why no one thought of this earlier:

Judging by who everyone on the internet has declared is unsuitable to be Obama’s VP, I’ve determined the one acceptable candidate left. Hawaii Senator Danial Akaka.

There are two major reasons that this choice works so brilliantly. Akaka doesn’t piss of PUMAs, Southerners who hate Northerners, Northerners who hate Southerners, Westerners who hate Easterners or Easterners who hate Westerners, people who want someone besides a conservative white guy and people who want a veteran.

More importantly, the ticket would be Obama/Akaka. More vowels than consonants for the first time EVER. And, bonus, if you say it too fast, it sounds like you’re saying “macaca”, which allows for infinite replays of the race card.

Think about it…

There are other reasons that Jesse didn't list: Foreign policy/security experience (Akaka serves on the Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Energy committees), and the biggest one of all, he voted against the War.

Plus, WWII veteran totally trumps Vietnam veteran, as we all know (just kidding!). But seriously, the man is a great-grandfather. He has 14 grandchildren. You think Malia and Sasha are adorable? Wait until you see great-grandchildren getting a hug from their 83-year-old World-War-II-veteran-voted-against-the-Iraq-War-great-grandfather.

For real.

rachel maddow to host show following olbermann

News yesterday that Rachel Maddow will take over the post-Olbermann time slot on MSNBC from Dan Abram's "Verdict":

No matter what form her show takes, there’s no question that the 35-year-old will cut a different figure than most of her cable brethren. An openly gay woman, unapologetic liberal and Rhodes scholar with a doctorate from Oxford University, Maddow has drawn a passionate following during her stint this year as an analyst for MSNBC.

Network executives are now trying to capitalize on her rising popularity, hoping that she will further their efforts to remake MSNBC as the destination for lively political news and analysis.

[...]

Maddow’s appointment is another indication of how MSNBC is embracing the political left in a quest for ratings. The strategy, driven largely by the success of Olbermann’s denunciations of the Bush Administration, has left NBC News open to criticism from Republicans who complain that the channel’s coverage is unfair.

But liberals were jubilant at the news of Maddow’s appointment. On the website Daily Kos, where Olbermann broke the news Tuesday in a “fully authorized leak,” one commenter posted a poem in her honor, calling her “the Everlasting Progressive, the Princess of News.”

Maddow, who will continue hosting her daily radio program on Air America, said she plans to make her new television program more than a political forum.

“We’ll do weird news from far away,” she told Olbermann. “I have weird obsessions that will probably make it onto the show. I’m obsessed with the Iraqi national soccer team. I think there’s a lot of domestic crime committed by naked men that needs a lot extra coverage.”

“We still haven’t defined the role of America in a post-Soviet world, let alone a post-9/11 world,” she added more seriously. “There’s so much going on between the election and the goofy that is neither. And I think after the election in part it’s going to be a little bit of a relief to have the whole wide world to cover, rather than just the election to chew on.”

Maddow, host of "The Rachel Maddow Show" on Air America, is one of the few progressive/liberal radio talk show hosts, and will continue her tradition as one of the few progressive/liberal cable news network talk show hosts (one of two, by my count).

Two videos below, the first her on Olbermann last night, the second her taking down Pat Buchanan. Wow... to think that this network used to be all about Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, and Chris Matthews.

"facebook causes are the new bumper stickers"

Facebook Causes are the new bumper stickers.

- Lanya Shapiro, Traction at the Demos "A Better Deal" Conference, Washington, D.C., May 9, 2008.

It's a great quote, and I had it written down on a piece of paper I just found when trying to clean my desk (hence the several month delay).

Read more about California-based Project Agape's Facebook Causes, which in its first year raised $2.5 million for almost 200,000 non-profits and charities.

i love the olympics, but i hate child abuse

I am furious. Outraged. The commentators on NBC during the Women's Gymnastics competition right now are vile, vile human beings.

Responding to the story that many of the Chinese women gymnasts are under the minimum Olympic age of 16, that the IOC and Federation of International Gymnastics are basically not enforcing this rule by allowing as proof of age the Chinese athletes' passports despite the fact that other sports registries are solid proof that at least three of the members of the team are under 16, what does NBC say about it?

Well, first, earlier today, there was this featured story, a response from NBC employee Bela Karolyi, former Romanian and U.S. women's gymnastics coach, had this to say:

"What kind of slap in the face is this?" he asked. "They are 12, 14 years old, max. And they line them up for the world ... and having the government back them.

"Since they forced an age limit, it has gotten worse and worse. The FIG is running away from the age problem. They set an age limit and now they can't control it."

[...]Karolyi is originally from Romania, and he says falsifying documents is a common practice in totalitarian regimes such as Romania, Russia and other former Soviet bloc nations.

The solution, he said, is to not have any age limit.

Oh. My. God. Bascially, "I know from working in a totalitarian state that the government will falsify documents that allow for child abuse, so the solution is to get rid of the age requirement!"

And just now, the NBC commentators basically agreed with him, sighing wistfully for the good old days when Romanian women's gymnasts were "stressed." They actually complained that the coach gave the woman a hug after her routine, because it showed that these women were lacking "intensity." "A far cry from the days of Karolyi," they shook their heads.

Have you considered that perhaps that's a good thing? Some background on Karolyi:

In America, Károlyi's training methods have been roundly criticized. Some of his former athletes, including Kristie Phillips and Erica Stokes, have stated publicly that Károlyi was verbally and psychologically abusive during workouts. Károlyi's constant critical remarks about weight and body type were said to drive some gymnasts to develop eating disorders and low self-esteem. [10] Some gymnasts, such as Phillips and 1988 Olympian Chelle Stack, have noted that they were compelled to continue training and competing even when coping with serious injuries such as broken bones.[10] In one interview, Dominique Moceanu, one of Károlyi's final proteges, noted: "I'm sure Bela saw injuries, but if you were injured, Bela didn't want to see it...You had to deal with it. I was intimidated. He looked down on me. He was 6-feet something, and I was 4-foot nothing."[11]

Károlyi was also said to strictly monitor his gymnasts' food intake: Moceanu, for instance, stated that at meets away from home, gymnasts were limited to consuming as little as 900 calories a day. [12] Even Károlyi supporters have admitted that at certain competitions, his gymnasts ate so sparingly that members of the men's gymnastics team smuggled food to them in their hotel rooms.[10]

Oh yeah, and in case you're wondering why I'm complaining about this or calling it child abuse, remember the choice quote from one NBC commentator after one of the possibly-underage girls' floor routine (I think it was Tim Daggett, but maybe it was Al Trautwig) (paraphrased, apologies): "You know, she [one of the Chinese competitors] begged her parents to come home, but they didn't let her, and we are lucky they didn't, because we got to see that performance."

Sick.

fear vs. hope: the mccain and obama campaigns

From Amanda Marcotte today at Pandagon:

[...]Rick Perlstein has reprinted a piece he wrote in 2007 about the role of the unconscious in right wing politics. It really sheds light on the way that conservatives manage to get out their racist, sexist, and homophobic messages without coming out and saying it, which makes it maddening to push back because there’s the plausible deniability factor. Like the McCain ad, linking Obama to images of white women that are most famous for being icons of people’s worst fears of female sexuality, which invokes an ugly racist stereotype without coming right out and saying it, so when liberals raise a fuss, conservatives can shrug and pretend they don’t see it.

One way that liberals push back against the stereotyping is to point out the obvious contradictions in right wing tropes. For instance, the “Obama=Muslim” trope obviously conflicts with the “Obama’s Christian church is out of control” trope. But maybe pointing out the contradictions is less effective than we would have hoped[.]

Fear is a Value, and the arguments made within it only have to be value-based, not necessarily fact-based.

According to communications experts like Lakoff and neurologists like Drew Westen, as well as discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, human brains don’t operate in what we think of as logical or linear ways. We don’t process information like computers. Instead, in order to deal with the enormous amount of information we take in every day, we build frames and categories in our minds. Especially when dealing with politics and issues of social policy, how the brain makes split-second evaluations of good or bad is influenced in very large part by what value the issue has been framed in. In case you couldn’t guess:

Fear = good for conservatives
Hope = good for progressives

Conservatives have been waging for a long time what is essentially a pure, values-based campaign strategy; that much we know. But it is also at the same time very much a strategy of personal attacks, and McCain’s campaign has been even more purely so. Look at the right wing tropes; they’re all about playing to the Fear frame in our brains and thus making us lean towards trusting the conservative: the authoritarian father figure.

When you look at it that way, all the tropes make perfect sense and fit together, relying on the value-frame of Fear of the Other. “Muslim” and “Radical Black Church” are both parts of a “mainstream” Christian Fear Value-Frame; yes, they share the same archetype of Radical Brown Religious Zealot, but they are primarily located in Fear. People don’t need to consciously think that “Obama is a Muslim who will create an Iranian Theocracy,” or that “Obama will only represent African Americans” for the attacks to work; all they need to do is be scared.

Same goes for “sexy” and “girly/effeminate.” Both are about Fear of the Other, in this case Fear of Sex/Women. As readers of this blog know, the conservatives love the equation “Sex (outside of Christian marriage) + Women = Destruction of Western Civilization!” The two are actually not contradictory at all, but rather necessary to each other; Sexy is only especially a cause of Fear when it’s possessed by an Other, and the girly/effeminate label does that.

In a racial context (b/c what attacks on Obama don’t have a racial context?), these two attacks have actually been tied together before (as referenced above) in racist tropes about Asian Americans. The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu is both hyper-sexual in his pursuit of White women, but in a perverse, effeminate way not conforming with Western notions of masculinity. This intersects with the Black Brute trope, but the Fu Manchu trope works especially well for Obama (note the WSJ article this week about Obama being a “skinny beanpole” who is “too thin to be president” (read: not a “Real Man").

The good news is that Obama is running a very good value-frame based campaign. Note that his slogans and paraphernalia all have to do with the value-frame of Hope: Change, Yes We Can, Believe. Talking more about values and less about issues probably also has a lot to do with how well he did in the primaries; progressives/liberals tend to have effusive reactions to the Hope value-frame, and they also make up the core of the primary electorate. Where Edwards went wrong may have been by playing too much this time to Fear (fear of the bad economy, fear of government ineffectiveness during and after Hurricane Katrina, etc.), and the Clinton campaign ran probably more on the Fear side than the Hope side as well (the Muslim trope didn’t start from nowhere in the general election), but the major mistake of both was being massively issue-focused, rather than value-framing.

Obama’s steering well away from the mistake of Democratic presidential candidates in the last 20 years or so of trying to run on Issues and letting the conservatives do all the framing (how did policy wonk Gore lose to know-nothing Bush? Well, think about what value-frame “lockbox” leads one to think in...). Issues don’t matter in U.S. politics, only frames do, since hardcore folks who pay attention to all the nuances of policy are likely already partisans, not the persuadables who rely on media coverage and adverts to get a “sense” of which candidate will be a better president (which is why the FISA debacle was especially stupid, since there’s no good Hope frame to put that in, only a Fear frame, and it would have played so well with his slogan of Change and right back into Hope).

(This post is a reprint of comments I made on the linked post).

support john chiang's effort to stop arnold from cutting public servant wages

California State Controller John Chiang is bravely standing up to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to 'fix' the state budget deficit by cutting the wages of public employees to the bare federal minimum wage of $6.55/hr, well below the California state minimum wage of $8.00/hr.

From John:

When I received word that Gov. Schwarzenegger was proposing to use California's state workers as pawns in the budget battle by cutting their pay to the federal minimum wage of $6.55, I said civil servants should not bear the brunt of the budget stalemate.

Since then, thousands of Californians have joined with me to protest the Governor's proposed -- and needless -- order to slash the pay of California's public servants. I want you to know I will stand strong against the Governor's threats.

Show Gov. Schwarzenegger that you stand with me by signing the California Democratic Party's petition at www.cadem.org/supportcaliforniaworkers.

Forcing public servants to involuntarily loan the State cash by foregoing their hard-earned paychecks puts an untenable burden on our teachers, health care workers and those who provide critical public services. That is just wrong.

Requiring a cut in pay for public employees -- especially as they, like many of us, struggle with their mortgages and higher gas and food prices -- will not only cause significant harm to those families, but also irreparably impact our fragile economy by further eroding consumer spending. It hurts us all.

I thank the thousands of you who signed the California Democratic Party's petition supporting my call for responsible and honest management of our state finances. Your support will send a strong message to the governor to quit the political posturing and show real leadership in resolving the budget crisis.

www.cadem.org/supportcaliforniaworkers


Sincerely,

John Chiang
Controller
State of California

P.S. And if you haven't signed the petition already, please take a moment right now to do so.

Cutting wages at a time when the cost of basic goods is skyrocketing (with an annual inflation rate of around 5% and gas/milk both near $5/gallon), huge numbers of foreclosures, and a generally unstable economy isn't just mean, it's fiscally irresponsible. Maintaining decent wages is one of the core components to keeping up consumer spending and helping to revitalize the market, and this is doubly true when talking about government employees. States are obviously facing many tough decisions with nationwide budget crises, but cutting public servant wages below the state minimum wage should be a non-starter. Sign the petition to make sure that it stays one.