election 2008

Via the Slog: the cutest thing ever, truly, is two four-year-olds debating the pros and cons of a certain two Democrats. It’s like that old Daily Show segment in which inane things said by TV pundits would be reenacted by children, but this one is definitely sui generis.

• Turkey reforms a controversial law prohibiting insulting “Turkishness”, but the reforms may not go far enough.
• E911 mistakenly sends help to Toronto rather than Calgary. Someone dies.
• In Israel, an Orthodox backlash against ultra-Orthodox domination of civil and religious institutions.
• Israel provides medical care to sick and injured Palestinians from Gaza. A bit of a bright spot in the middle of swirling chaos.
• A substitute teacher claims that accusations of wizardry cost him his job.
• The New York Times discovers (in the Fashion and Style section, naturally) that transgendered spouses face legal challenges in the United States. Feministe has some interesting and important reactions.
• Gas Tax Spam:
  

  If you accept we will deliver to your a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a “GAS TAX HOLIDAY”. You will then deliver this money to accounts of our friends in Middle East by taking it to your nearby gasoline station where they have information to forward the money. Please supply your bank account, social security number, address and your vote in DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES AND NOVEMBER GENERAL ELECTION.

Real posting resuming soon! Thanks for the holiday, internet.

• Privacy
  • Agents at the U.S. border can search your laptop without cause, on the legal grounds that they already have an exception to the Fourth Amendment that allows them to search any paper documents you have with you. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • Los Angeles International Airport and New York’s JFK Airport will start using a new technology to electronically strip-search passengers. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • An atheist soldier sues the U.S. Army over personal threats because of his choice of religion. Privacy—and freedom of religion—advocates are concerned.
• Politics
  • A college student utterly pwns John Ashcroft during a campus appearance. If you haven’t seen this one yet, go read it; it’s amazing.
  • How does the Democratic primary end? There are three possibilities, and none of them are good for the future of the party.
  • On the other hand, if Clinton somehow manages to win, it’s payback time in Clintonland.
• Culture
  • Sun Myung Moon, worldwide cult leader and lesser-known owner of the right-wing Washington Times, was crowned as the Second Coming—in a U.S. Senate office building.
  • Richard Dawkins’s open letter to an unsuspecting victim of Ben Stein’s awful creationist propaganda film Intelligent Design-informed exposé of Charles Darwin, Expelled.
  • In Alabama, an experiment in gay hand-holding in public by the newsmagazine 20/20 generates an emergency call to 911 by a concerned citizen under the impression that laws were being broken.
  • Textbooks cost too much. What can be done about it, realistically?

Your must-watch for today: Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on Hillary Clinton and the Geraldine Ferraro debacle. Seriously, take the ten minutes. It’s worth it for both the news/commentary value but also the journalistic candor that has been so lacking from the media lately.

I’ve been horribly busy the last few days with a research project—it is done for the moment, however, so in the time in between now and when I can calm down enough to write a ‘real’ post, here’s a list of interesting tabs that have been open in my Firefox since a few days ago:

• Sometimes I think my viola-playing belongs in the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Microsoft executives are not surprised to learn how awful Windows Vista really is.
• Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President and current Clinton hench-person, believes that Obama has got this far only because he’s a black man.
• Some amusing British humour about the U.S. presidential election.
• Required reading: Daniel Gordis’s most recent dispatch regarding how Hayyim Nachman Bialik would be mortified by the State of Israel today.
• Iraq really didn’t have WMDs—can you friggin’ believe it?
• Chris Beam’s excellent insight that the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is more likely to harm the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Now I can close all those tabs, and Firefox can stop memory-leaking (ha). Hat-tips all round.

In an op-ed in today’s LA Times, Aaron Miller takes a stab at explaining why large segments of the American Jewish population seem to have it in for Barack Obama—or anybody else who can even be remotely connected with criticism of Israel:

Don’t get me wrong. Jews—and yes, I am one of them—worry for a living. Their history compels them to and to be always vigilant. Yet in America, where they have achieved a level of security, acceptance and power unparalleled in their history, their existential worries paradoxically seem to have grown even greater. When Jimmy Carter writes a book—a bad book, incidentally—comparing Zionism to apartheid, many American Jews go crazy. When two university professors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, write another bad book—about what they call “the Israel lobby”—many Jews react as if the sky is falling.

Essentially, what’s going on is a severe overreaction to any perceived threats against Israel. Israel is equated with the Jewish people both there and in the Diaspora. Never mind that the ultra-Orthodox elements in Israel, which have de facto control over the country’s civil life, hate—to the point of considering Not Jewish—liberal Jews, or even Orthodox Jews who don’t wear the right hat. (In case you missed it, Gershom Gorenberg had an excellent piece in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine demonstrating the extent of this ultra-Orthodox control and craziness when it comes to ‘proving’ your Jewishness for the purpose of marriage in or immigration to Israel.) Back to Miller:

This “us versus them” mentality still runs deep, and it is particularly harmful when it comes to the Arab-Israeli issue. That conflict is not some kind of morality play in which the forces of evil do battle against the forces of light. It is a conflict in which both sides have legitimate needs and requirements and do both good and bad things in pursuit of them.

This point, unfortunately, is correct in its essence. However, as we’ve learned time and time again, nuance simply doesn’t sell. And if your message is at all nuanced—not 100% rah-rah Israel, all Arabs are terrorists, etc.—then you are, by definition, an enemy not only of Israel but of the Jewish people. How pathetic is the discourse, how sad is the conversation? There is neither discourse nor conversation, because the attitude is ‘us versus them’—nuance equals betrayal.

The odious John Hagee, supporter of John McCain, has added yet another stupid set of assertions to the racist and ridiculous things he’s done lately, like organizing a ’slave sale’ and calling the Catholic Church ‘the great whore’. Now, I know it’s unfair to hold candidates accountable for every last thing said and done by their supporters, as people are doing with Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Barack Obama, but the difference here is that Obama has repudiated Farrakhan while McCain appears to be sticking by Hagee and his endorsement. (There’s a serious double standard with how the media are handling both of these cases, but what else is new.)

And now, Hagee apparently believes that Jews are responsible for their own suffering and persecution:

“It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day. …

How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for His chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings He had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come … it rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people.”

That was me, sorry. My personal rebelliousness and disobedience brought on God’s wrath, and made Him send John Hagee and Louis Farrakhan to earth to let me know just how bad I was for eating a California roll with real crab that one time, or for driving to Seattle yesterday on the Sabbath. My bad.

This is not a new idea, theologically speaking—the Bible provides this justification over and over when bad things happen to the Jewish people, notably in the Book of Lamentations (check out 1.8, 3.39–47, and 5.16–18 for some typical examples). However, nobody except religious nuts and douchebags takes this ‘line of reasoning’ seriously. Kingdoms and countries are always getting sacked by other kingdoms and countries. This is the human race we’re talking about, people. What a douchebag, this religious nut Hagee.

(Hat-tip: AMERICAblog.)

Update: Josh Marshall has video and analysis of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tex.) both totally blowing it on McCain and Hagee on television today.

With John Edwards out on the Democratic side and Rudy Giuliani out on the Republican side, this leaves only a few candidates remaining in the party primaries in the U.S. presidential race. Obama is looking increasingly strong, having raised $32 million from over 170,000 new donors in January alone, Romney is looking more and more like the doofus we all know he is, Hillary is wisely telling Bill to tone it down for fear he lost South Carolina for her, and the McCain train looks like it’s leaving the station, to the chagrin of much of the American right-wing. This is looking increasingly like a Hillary-Obama race that will be decided on Super Tuesday, versus McCain on the Republican side. But lest we overlook the positive demographic side of all this: the Democratic nominee is now guaranteed not to be a white male! As Jon Stewart put it on last night’s A Daily Show:

Edwards’ departure leaves the Democratic nomination down to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, which means that the Founding Fathers finally have a winner in their ‘How Long Will It Take Our Nation To Nominate A Non-White Male’ betting pool. Oh, I can’t wait to find out who is the winner. Ladies and gentlemen, George Mason of Virginia correctly guessed—two hundred and nineteen years! Congratulations, Georgey!

In related news from the world of primaries, Slate’s ‘Explainer’ column has an excellent explanation of what happens to Edwards’s delegates at the Democratic National Convention now. And it will be interesting to watch what happens with the first ever global primary for Democrats living abroad, which will be electing state-level delegates to be seated and vote at the Convention on behalf of the millions of Democratic voters residing outside the United States. This will be fascinating on both a political and a technological level: will it even ‘work’—however we define that—and what, if any, will be its long-term effects?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the solar system, Ron Paul’s campaign is, apparently, still going strong, and America is still, apparently, deeply in love with him. In fact, he is, apparently, the only Republican even bothering to show up in some states, which shows that he at least thinks that he can reciprocate that love to large portions of the country. Just check out some of his vastly impressive press releases if you aren’t prepared to take my word for it. And from even further reaches of our solar system, Ralph ‘I-didn’t-cost-Gore-the-election-but-Bush-and-Gore-cost-me-the-election’ Nader is thinking about throwing his hat into the ring once again. (Surely it’s no coincidence, as Chris Beam points out, that this is coming to light right after Edwards, the Democrat whom Nader had endorsed, dropped out of the race.) I can only sigh and wonder who’s funding Nader this time around.

Eugene Robinson has a very interesting piece in today’s Truthdig that wonders what exactly the deal is with Bill Clinton these days. Clinton, by far the most popular living ex-president, has been joining the attacks on his wife Hillary’s opponent for the Democratic nomination for President, Barack Obama, to such a fierce degree that Obama recently told an interviewer, ‘I feel like I’m running against both Clintons.’ The fundamental problem, Robinson suggests, is that Obama is peddling the message—or more importantly, the Clintons see him as peddling the message—that Bill Clinton’s accomplishments during his eight years of tenure as President were insufficient, or have been reversed by the Bush administration, or never really achieved much anyway in the way of actually uniting people. Bill Clinton seems to be taking this as a personal affront and is responding in kind, going after Obama himself, the media (for what the Clinton camp sees as biased pro-Obama media coverage), and by extension quite a large segment of the American electorate.

Furthermore, at least some of Obama’s appeal is tapping into the feelings of some Democrats that sure, Clinton was great, but do the people of the United States really want another four or eight years of triangulation, centrism, and the appearance of two straight all-in-the-family dynasties? Going a rather unfortunate step further, Republican author and ex-Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan suggested over the weekend that ‘Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton’ is a ’sickness’—a feeling she ascribed to ’so many people’, with no foundation at all. While she may be hyperbolic in her language, I have to wonder to what extent this issue is present and underlying much of what we’re seeing happen in the Democratic primaries, and what impact it will have on the general election come November. Expect more to be made of this as Bill Clinton’s involvement in Hillary’s campaign grows, along with his willingness to play the bad cop.

After providing crucial confirmation of his views that the United States Constitution should be amended to conform to ‘God’s word’, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has, in the same interview, directly equated homosexuality with bestiality. And this isn’t what is usually meant by ‘equates’, which is something like ‘mentioned in the same breath’. He means to draw the direct equivalence between that two men having sex with one another and a man having sex with an animal:

Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.

This has already been kicked around by the blogosphere a bit, especially by Talking Points Memo and by John Aravosis, who rightly points out that it’s about time the media start treating Huckabee’s nutty religious views as the same sort of fair game as he seems to treat Mitt Romney’s supposed beliefs, as a Mormon, in the siblinghood of Jesus and the Devil.

But I haven’t yet seen anybody raise the question: if two gay men having sex is like a man having sex with a (non-human) animal, which of the participants in the H. sapiens-on-H. sapiens sex is equivalent, from a physical, metaphysical, and/or moral standpoint, to the non-human participant in the latter case? Follow-up question: how far removed from ‘human’, taxonomically speaking, does Huckabee intend this equivalence to extend? Surely he means to exclude things in kingdoms other than Animalia, thus permitting the usage of, say, vegetable matter in lawful sexual relations between husband and wife as God intended. I foresee some tricky grey areas here.

Oh, and one other question: if we are to take the bible at its word–you know, literally–the prohibition on bestiality would seem to apply specifically, if perhaps not exclusively, to women (Leviticus 18.23)):

וּבְכָל־בְּהֵמָ֛ה לֹֽא־תִתֵּ֥ן שְׁכָבְתְּךָ֖ לְטָמְאָה־בָ֑הּ וְאִשָּׁ֗ה לֹֽא־תַעֲמֹ֞ד לִפְנֵ֧י בְהֵמָ֛ה לְרִבְעָ֖הּ תֶּ֥בֶל הֽוּא׃

Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.

I have chosen the King James Version translation–which is close enough here to the Hebrew for my purposes–to try to reflect some of the theology underlying, as it were, the sexual philosophy of people like Mike Huckabee. What about it, Mike? Do you believe that women need to be specially interdicted from animal-human relations? Does this require a Constitutional amendment–perhaps in the same vein as an anti-abortion amendment? Why not just have a whole anti-female amendment while you’re at it? Oh wait, it’s halfway there already.

If New Hampshire doesn’t go well for Hillary, which seems more and more likely now that the polls are consistently finding double-digit leads for Obama, you can bet she’s going to go through with some sort of shake-up to her campaign staff, most likely involving replacing the weird and ever-reliable-to-make-your-campaign-fail strategist Mark Penn. But it probably won’t be as drastic as this:

In what some party insiders are calling a Hail Mary bid to win Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton today attempted to repackage herself as a black man. … Speaking at a rally in Manchester, N.H., Clinton thanked her supporters for “keeping it real” and promoted her just-released autobiography, The Bodacicty of Hope. “This election is about whether or not America is ready to elect a black man president of the United States,” she said. “I believe I am that black man.”

As Little Buttercup once famously noted, “The poor bumboat woman has gipsy blood in her veins, and she can read destinies! … There is a change in store for you … be prepared!” And I fear that though a mystic tone she borrows, Hillary will learn the truth with sorrow. Here today, and gone tomorrow.

Yes I know—that is so!

The Iowa caucuses are over, and with Barack Obama’s and Mike Huckabee’s rather stunning and convincing wins over the rest of the Democratic and Republican fields, respectively, I though I would add my admittedly paltry two cents to the fray—what’s the blogosphere for, anyway?

The winners: Obama and Huckabee rightly deserve the praise for winning by such impressive margins, and at least in Obama’s case a clear front-runner has emerged and everybody else is playing catch-up. John Edwards, however, made a strong showing, and finished second—barely ahead of Hillary, but the only thing that registers with many people is the ordinal numbers in front of the names. He will definitely also be a factor in the upcoming weeks. The other clear winner is John “100 years in Iraq is fine by me” McCain, who seems to be getting a hell of a lot of media attention from various sources that for whatever reason simply love to fawn on him. He didn’t do very well in the caucuses, but he’s going to have lots of media momentum on his side.

The sort-of winners: Mike Huckabee may have won the caucuses by a 9% margin, but the Republican side is still extremely muddled. Giuliani finished sixth in the caucuses, except he had never really paid much attention to Iowa at all, and still definitely has the wherewithal to do well in many other states, especially those that hold their primary elections on Super Tuesday. The other person who had some kind of victory was Ron Paul, who managed to pull out a whopping 10%. This from a guy everyone wishes would just go away. Giuliani came in sixth with 3.5%, and he’s still getting invited to Fox News’s debate, whereas fifth-place Ron Paul is still being unceremoniously excluded. Ron Paul won’t win the Republican nomination, but be on the lookout for a possible third-party bid that could Naderize the Republican side of the 2008 elections. He certainly has the fundraising apparatus and crazy robot-like supporters—almost à la another erstwhile also-ran and his cult-like following—to make a fight of it.

The losers: Mitt Romney doesn’t come out of this looking good, but Hillary Clinton, obviously, is the big loser of the night. Her whole campaign was based on the inevitability of her candidacy, and now that approach is obviously broken and in need of some serious (and fast) rethinking. So she’s now reduced to insinuating that Obama is ‘too liberal‘ and that he has has associations with left-wing intellectuals. Err, the 1920s called; they want their rhetoric back. (Actually, it wasn’t historically just rhetoric: sometimes it was blatant xenophobia too.)

The whole primary/caucus process in the United States is silly, with various states wielding disproportionate influence. Complaining about this is old hat, however, and there’s really nothing new to be said about it. Nothing is going to change until the abolition of federalism and the recognition of all citizens of the great ‘democracy’ of the United States as truly equal—not just those who happen to live within arbitrary boundaries that for stupid historical reasons dictate that they can proceed to dictate to the rest of the country who’s going to be on their ballots in November.

So yeah, look for that.