Before I got to Ohio, I knew what everyone else knew: Ohio Democracy is a joke. An awful, sick, joke where racism keeps the Republican Party in power.
I didn’t know until I got there that those problems had been taken care of. Jennifer Brunner had been on the case. Jenifer Brunner fixed the lines, and gave minorities their vote back.
3 Days ago she announced for the Senate.
I hope she wins.
Just as a reminder: in 2000, the United States elected a president who would go on to torture people, and do so in the name of the American People. In 2008, I worked to elect a man who promises to end that practice, and close down the factory in which we do so.
Barack, you’re on the hook now. You need to begin shutting this place down before 100 days have passed. Do that and I’ll forgive much. Don’t do that and, well… I don’t like your chances for reelection..
Matthew Yglesias comes to the utterly unremarkable finding that the House Republican Leadership is deeply polarized. Except that he misinterprets the data. A lot.
DW nominate is a simply score of voting behavior. It’s based on an economic theory called “Spatial voting theory”.* Every time 2 congress members vote together, they move in the same direction. Every time they vote separately, they move apart. It adds a nice visual flavor to dry statistics, and there are a ton of books on the subject. DW nominate can tell you is how often a members of a party act in concert with one another. What it can’t tell you is how “right wing” or “left wing” a person– or party– is.
For example: Assume every Republican votes A) against an individual mandate for healthcare, and B) for Universal Healthcare, and Every Democrat votes A) For the individual mandate, and B) for universal Healthcare. We’d see every member of congress take 1 step away from every member of the opposite party**. This would be an extremely polarized congress, but not one that fits into anyone’s definition of the Right/Left divide.
What we expect to see in caucus leaders is that they tend to vote the same way they’re instructing their caucus to vote. The fact that there are people in the GOP caucus who voted with the caucus more than the leadership is interesting– and may explain why the house GOP had so many troubles over the last two years. But this data does not say that the GOP is moving rightward. We’ll have to look elsewhere for that…
* AKA: POL 100 at UC Davis.
**And incidentally end up with Universal Healthcare with an Individual mandate. Hooray!
I was chatting with Harold Goldstein* a couple days ago. He, like many liberals, is sort of terrified that if Obama is successful at getting a liberal agenda passed, there will be a backlash, causing us to lose power.
This may be true. We liberals got our agenda passed in 1964 and “[lost] the south for a generation”. In 1932, we created a whole “New Deal”, which conservatives have been running against for 70 years.
The thing is, most of the Liberal Agenda is pretty popular. We’re offering people Health Care and an end to the war. If we can get just those 2 things, there can’t be a backlash powerful enough to actually matter. The point of “power” is not some mindless holding of the same, but rather it’s the ability to achieve things. Obama has the ability to achieve things that would really make the world a better place.
We should not fear the backlash. We should fear children dying because the richest country on Earth cannot properly allocate resources. If we save lives and lose elections, it’s a small price to pay…
*around my family, we call him “Uncle Harold”, since my father had the good sense to marry his sister a decade or so ago.
This rather good article in the Politico about Pelosi gives me a good excuse to mention a few thoughts about what the Rahm Emmanuel pick means for the Obama Whitehouse
Until a few months ago, there were basically 2 centers of power within the Democratic Party. Howard Dean’s office and Pelosi’s Office. Reid, near as I can tell, was a non-player. Rahm Emmanuel was Pelosi’s Chief rival. Near as I can tell, he was trying to take credit for the 2006 election since roughly 5 minutes before any results came in.
Now: Obama wins the Whitehouse. Suddenly there are 3 people who can claim to be the power in the Democratic party. This is going to be trouble for everyone. Dean announces that he is going to step down– as he had always intended to do. And Obama takes Pelosi’s biggest rival and makes him Whitehouse Chief of Staff. This removes a sore spot in Pelosi’s leadership team, and puts a major power player on the Obama Staff.
What does this tell us about an Obama administration? He’s a shrewd, shrewd man who will do what it takes to get his agenda passed…
Under the McCain plan, the rich get richer, and everyone else gets… All their services cut to pay for rich-folk taxcuts. And since the economy depends on everyone not-rich pooling their resrouces to defend themselves against the depredations of the rich, we’re screwed under McCain’s plan.
Unless anyone thinks the traders at Lehman Brothers, brokers at Enron etc couldn’t have spared a few hundred thousand of their millions.
Of course, under Obama’s plan, all but the top .1% of income earners do better than today. For the other 99.9% of us, Well, we get to buy things to fuel the economy. Neat, huh?
The name “planned parenthood” will turn off a lot of people…
Sarah Palin last night (03 Sept 2008):
“I told the Congress “thanks, but no thanks,” for that Bridge to Nowhere.” (via
Sarah Palin 12 months ago (21 Sept 2007):
“Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport, but the $398 million bridge is not the answer,” said Governor Palin. “Despite the work of our congressional delegation, we are about $329 million short of full funding for the bridge project, and it’s clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island,” via
Sounds to me like she wanted that money from congress. But congress wouldn’t play ball. Fair enough, she wasn’t governor at the time, and her 527 group wasn’t quite strong enough to give Sen. Stevens any clout. All that is fair enough.
But Palin should stop lying about that bridge.