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Second in a series...

Election day thread

Post anything about your voting experience in the comments. As for me, except for some Austin bond proposals (for which I voted yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes), my vote will probably not be in play. Gotta love that sweet, sweet redistricting. The lines were much longer than usual, but my polling place had also moved, so there's really no way to draw any conclusions from the long lines.

Democracy kicks ass!

Where's my sticker?

I count. I voted. I know that. But without social recognition, how am I to constitute myself as a subject?

Rick Perry is going to be the longest-serving governer in Texas history

What is wrong with this farkin' state!?

According to a new DMN poll (and is that a site redesign I see?), Perry is expected to fall short of 40 percent of the vote, Bell has 22 percent, Strayhorn’s at 18 percent and Kinky’s at 11 percent. Now remember, this is just a poll of LIKELY voters as opposed to Kinky’s imaginary miracle voters.
...
Roughly 42 percent of men support Perry, compared to 37 percent of women. In contrast, only eight percent of women support Friedman because everybody knows that women don’t get the funny. Around 51 percent of black voters support Bell, compared to give or take 0 percent for Kinky. And that includes Frank from Atlanta.
| in the pink texas |

I stand by my plan to vote for the candidate who has the best chance at unseating Perry, and thankfully that appears to be Chris Bell. I wouldn't mind a kinky governor, and I wouldn't even mind Kinky as governor. But I'll feel better casting my vote for the Democrat in the race.

Video game news

[Anything, anything, to push the picture of dog anus below the fold. I shudder to think about the google hits we are about to receive.]

The Culture Minister of France thinks that people don't take videogames seriously enough:

Call me the minister of video games if you want - I am proud of this," the minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, said during an interview. "People have looked down on video games for far too long, overlooking their great creativity and cultural value.

His next move is to get video games recognized as an art form which would make it eligible for government tax breaks, much like the French movie industry.

Meanwhile, in Korea, some kids are taking videogames way to seriously:

For nerds. Seems Korea's fascination with online gaming is taking a turn for the strange, with real-life brawls amongst gaming clans and guilds becoming increasingly common. The latest instance of what's become known as "Hyon-P" involves 28 high school kids, who after a chat room stoush decided to settle things with fisticuffs on the local schoolyard.

Many Koreans maintain much closer ties between the online and offline world than most other cultures, with gaming clans regularly meeting and socialising in person, as well as online. While this probably has all kinds of positive social benefits when things are going swimmingly, when they aren't, well...28 high school kids will arrange to meet up in the playground and beat the absolute crap out of each other.

And finally, to reinforce my point that you really should buy an Xbox 360, check out the grade each console has received from GameDaily:

• PS3: B+
• XBox 360: A
• Wii: A-
• DS Lite: A
• PSP: B
• XBox: D
• GameCube: C
• PS2: B+

Confession

A Michael Steele victory in Maryland Senate race wouldn't upset me very much. Unless, that is, it turns out that the Maryland race makes the difference between the Dems controlling the Senate and not (but I just can't see the Dems taking the Senate).

People believe some crazy shit, let me tell you

From Ted Haggard's statement to his former Congregation at the New Life Church:

I am a deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life. For extended periods of time, I would enjoy victory and rejoice in freedom. Then, from time to time, the dirt that I thought was gone would resurface, and I would find myself thinking thoughts and experiencing desires that were contrary to everything I believe and teach. |Source: (pdf)|

The picture is from this site, via an email from the proprietor of this site. It depicts a miracle, the appearance of Jesus' image on a dog's ass.

For what it's worth, as crazy as Haggard, his wife, and their congregation's ideas are about what counts as repulsive and dark and requiring forgiveness, when they get down to brass tacks and start forgiving people, well that's about as good as Christianity gets. Them folks ought to do more of that, or leverage it, or do whatever it is we do these days with things that are well and truly admirable.

...and statistics

I've been trying to come up with a clever label for the sort of person who, while leaning left on most issues, is nevertheless credulously sympathetic to Republican talking points. Lately I've favored the term "idiot", but I'd prefer something a little more fine grained.

Be that as it may, it's worth keeping in mind how easy it is to fall into this particular brand of idiocy. For example, I had been planning to link approvingly to this Krauthammer column, since, given the source, it seemed to me to be an uncommonly reasonable piece of political analysis. Krauthammer's main point, for those of you who can't be bothered to follow the link, is that a Democratic electoral victory shouldn't be interpreted as a repudiation of the GOP. The key fact he relies on and builds his argument around is that, "Since the end of World War II, the average loss for a second-term presidency in its sixth year has been 29 House seats and six Senate seats."

Seems pretty reasonable. But:

Nice try, guys, but here's the reality. Up through the 70s, big swings in House elections were common, but in the last 20 years there's only been a single year with a big swing (1994). Aside from that, the average change has been less than five seats. You can see the same thing if you look only at sixth-year midterms:

1958: 49 seats

1966: 47 seats

1974: 49 seats

1986: 5 seats

1998: 5 seats

See the trend? In the two sixth-year midterms since 1980, only five seats changed hands. There are plenty of reasons for this, including improved gerrymandering, huge money imbalances, and increased self-segregation...Bottom line: Thirty years ago a pickup of 25 seats wouldn't have been that big a deal. Today it is. If Dems win that many seats, it really will be a historic victory. |Kevin Drum|

That's about as close to a knock down refutation as you're ever going to get.

But let's bring this back to the idiocy. Note two things. First, Krauthammer's column is fundamentally dishonest. It just isn't possible to work the math and come up with the averages without noticing the trend in the data that Drum points out. Krauthammer's concern wasn't to support a conclusion through argument, but was rather to fool his readers. Second, for Krauthammer to get away with this kind of dodge requires that readers trust Krauthammer to argue honestly. Given his history, granting such trust is an idiotic thing to do.

Now, obviously, conservatives don't have a monopoly on misleading rhetoric. But, just as obviously to anyone who's not an idiot, the Repubican message machine reaches further, exhibits stricter message discipline, and is more systematically mendacious than anything their political opponents have on offer. Given this, anyone who finds themselves sympathetic to a political analysis promulgated by the GOP really ought to stop and ask themselves a question:

"Am I being played for an idiot?"

The answer is probably yes.

Corrective

I feel a little guilty about making fun of Haggard below, so here's a quote from Matthew Yglesias, who gets the issue exactly right:

Shadenfreude and hypocrisy aside, though, it's be nice -- unrealistic, perhaps, but nice -- if people took this as an opportunity to learn something. Obviously, the other men in that image with Haggard -- Tony Perkins, James Dobson, etc. -- know him, get along with him, and have worked with him as a colleague, like him, think he's a good man, and so forth. And Dobson and Perkins aren't alone. Lots of people have worked with or for Haggard over the years. He's a widely respected man in this country. Should all those people who know him, and have followed him really so sharply revise their views of Haggard, or should they revise their views of gay people? The latter, I think, though I'm not optimistic that's how it'll play.|Yglesias|

Reasons the internets are cool, numbers 294,283 and 294,284

Seems like most of the stuff I've been posing lately has come from my friend trp0. I didn't give him proper credit for sending me the hippy proteins yesterday. Here are a couple other interesting things:

First up, a tag cloud of of U.S. State of the Union speeches. You can quickly scroll through the various eras to see how terms pop into usage, persist for a decade, and ultimately vanish. Pretty cool, and you can find it here. ("Hey, Jason, what's a tag cloud?" I'm glad you asked.)

Second, just for fun, a pie chart that shows exactly how much of that same pie chart resembles pac man. Videogaming metafun!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your Republican-controlled Congress!

If the office you set up to audit the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq finds out that the U.S. military, the occupational authority, and your no-bid contractors messed everything up really bad, you could use that information to fix those problems. Or, if you are the Repulican-controlled Congress, you could shut down the auditor.

(link via the agonist)

Caption contest

(Yes, yes, liberals, progressives and Democrats should refuse to take the bait and should talk about this instead of this. I understand that. But if we've learned anything in the years since Dr. Strangelove, it's that there are no funny pictures involving nuclear explosions.)

Memo to Mark Halperin

What is absurd and troubling about the anger on the right and the left is that these people seize on whatever wisp of a phrase they wish in a wider discussion and twist it to their own purposes.

That's Mark Halperin writing in today's installment of, well follow this link. It's one of those Slate things.

Now that I've quoted that, here's a wisp of a phrase from later in the article.

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are extraordinarily polarizing figures...

The difference between these two "extraordinarily polarizing figures", of course, is that George W. Bush is polarizing because he is the figurehead of an extraordinarily inept administration most notable for its extraordinarily shameless and hateful approach to politics, whereas Bill Clinton is polarizing because he was a target of a Republican machine employing an extraordinarily shameless and hateful approach to politics. This isn't rocket science or French philosophy. It isn't complex, and yet distinctions matter.

tRNA knows how to party

This is unusual.

Protein Synthesis: an Epic on the Cellular Level

They need no lamp nor light of the sun

Democrats (and their reluctant supporters) hoping to relive 2004's pre-election victory anticipation giddiness are advised to read Ruy Teixeira's latest dispatch. For myself, the most interesting part was his disparagement of GOTV in general and the GOP GOTV effort in particular. Of course, given my mindless adherance to the organizing model, I can't help but be somewhat skeptical of Teixeira's skepticism in both the general and particular cases. Consider, for example, this Mark Mellman passage that Teixeira approvingly quotes:

But didn’t the GOP prove its efforts were much more effective than the Democrats’ in 2004? No. Check the data. In Ohio’s base Democratic precincts turnout was 8.2 points higher than it had been in 2000. In base Republican precincts, turnout increased by a slightly lesser 6.1 points. Winning a state is not the same as doing a better job on turnout.

This data seems to me to be exactly what you'd expect to see given the supposed core strength of the Rovian GOTV system --namely, the ability to target isolated Republican voters in otherwise Democratic precincts. On the other hand, I know a few hard core Dems who've somehow wound up on a lot of Republican mailing lists, so maybe the hype really is out of control.

In other news, check out the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Congressional Support the Troops scorecard.

The future

Wells Tower's report on this summer's YAF sponsored National Conservative Student Conference is a laugh riot. You could read the whole thing if you had bought the November issue of Harper's. Failing that, here's an excerpt:

In her facebook bio, Samantha Soller listed among her hobbies "political science, philosophy, and hippie-hunting, enjoys foreclosing on poor people's cardboard boxes, eating red meat, using her Sigarms P232 Stainless to shoot cute little bunny rabbits." I ask her about the gun.

"It's a semiautomatic handgun. I don't have one, but I would love to own one soon. It's really cute. It's silver. It fits in your handbag."

We close in on the catering trays, which today are full of steak and chicken fajita meat. The sight douses the cheer that mention of the Sigarms P232 had stirred in Soller's hale, brown cheeks. "What is this?" she says, surveying the buffet. "I don't eat anything that's not American."

A boy standing nearby assures her. "It is American; it's Tex-Mex."

Soller frowns. "I'm having the salad," she says. "I don't want to get sick."

I can't stop. Here's another excerpt. Note the recurrence of the salad motif.

The guest lecturer at the Thursday "Men's Lunch" is Dr. Harvey Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University. According to the program, Mansfield will talk about "manliness," which is also the title of his most recent book. The ladies, meanwhile, are supposed to be lunching with Bay Buchanan, but several of them, declaring a preference for Mansfield's remarks on manliness, launch a respectful, small-scale insurgency against the breakdown of coeducational order. The ladies are eventually permitted to sit "at tables in the back of the room that do not have salad," Roger Custer, the conference's director, specifies beforehand.

Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair!

Clark Sorensen has created some of the most amazing and beautiful urinals one is likely to ever see. Each is meticulously hand built and one of a kind - formed from high fire porcelain and fired to cone 10 (2300° F). These pieces are magnificent works of art but they are also fully functioning vitreous porcelain fixtures that can be plumbed and used in a bathroom. They are made of the same material as a commercial toilet but the similarity stops there. Clark hopes that his sculptures can be exhibited as art and installed as urinals in galleries and bathrooms around the world.

Check out some of the others. All truly wise people judge a society based on its toilets, and these are freakin' cool.

(thanks to the Monkey for sending this along)