The ACLU has won another victory: as it happens, the so-called “National Security letters” said to deny recipients the right to disclose Federal information demands are unconstitutional.

“My Administration will value science and facts” is the sort of thing that makes the Heathen very happy, at least until we realize that we’ve just lived through eight years so hostile to scientific consensus that the incoming president needs to remind us that he’ll, you know, not insist the moon is made of green cheese, or that abstinence education works.

In case you missed it, throwing a shoe is a big deal in Arab cultures.

Agitator has a little about what might’ve motivated this.

So, there’s been a bit of hoopla lately about network neutrality and what the Obama administration’s position might be thereon. NN is the idea that all net traffic should be treated the same, and that telcos shouldn’t be able to prioritize some data over others — just as the phone company doesn’t prioritize party A’s calls over party B’s on the basis of some “Gold Seal” level of service sold to A. This is a good notion for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that we don’t want the increasingly diversely-interested telcos deciding to, say, detain packets of data related to competitors’ services. (The other angle is that in order to deliver better service for some packets relative to today’s mode of work, you’d basically just be degrading everything else. It’s not like they’re gonna roll out a new nationwide fiber network and charge admission to the fast lane; it’s all about putting roadblocks up.)

Anyway, one bullshit argument the telcos love to use — especially when they can have idiot sockpuppet pseudo-analysts do their shilling for them — is that a network-neutral world is why Google gets such a free ride.

Free ride, you say? What’s he talking about? Good question. The idea is that Google, since it’s not paying for the round trip of bandwidth between you and Gmail, is somehow getting a subsidy. Except — first — every Google customer is paying for bandwidth somewhere, and — second — Google of course pays for bandwidth to its data centers. Does Google pay for bandwidth at the same rate you do? Of course not, just as Nestle pays a lot less for sugar than you do:

This is stupid on so many levels I’m almost too stunned to know where to begin. Why would you ever imagine that the per-byte cost of getting upstream traffic out on a few enormous pipes would be the same as the per-byte cost on the downstream side, where the same traffic is dispersed to a bazillion consumers, each with their own broadband connection? (Nestle pays a lot less per pound than you do for sugar; I await a “research study.”) What would possess anyone to posit that there’s some inherently “fair” division of the cost of connecting end users to popular (mostly free) services anyway? Google adds value to the product ISPs sell, presumably helping them to attract customers; should Eric Schmidt be demanding compensation for the “implicit subsidy”?

Today is the anniversary of the ratification of the Twenty First Amendment which repealed the 18th, thereby ending Prohibition in the US.

Happy Repeal Day!.

The lame-duck administration is quietly shoving non-scientist political appointees into career scientist jobs, thereby extending their fact-hostile, doctrinaire view of the world well into the next administration.

The counting’s all but over, and it is now possible to call the Alaskan Senate race. Multiple-felon Stevens is OUT; Begich is in.

The Senate now holds 56 actual Democrats plus Joe Lieberman (who is not an actual Democrat; he lost his primary but ran in the general anyway as an “independent Democrat” in 2006) and Bernie Sanders (an actual Independent, from Vermont). The race in Minnesota (Coleman v. Franken) is still in recount hell, but could break for Franken easily.

Saxby Chambliss in Georgia didn’t win a majority of the votes (he got 49.8%), so he’ll have to sit for a runoff — a runoff in which the entire Democratic party will be pushing for his opponent, Jim Martin (46.8; the Libertarian candidate got 3.4%).

Chambliss won his seat in 2002 by painting decorated veteran and triple-amputee Max Cleland as somehow unpatriotic in a series of smear ads on local media. He’s a douchebag of the first water, and deserves to be kicked to the curb more than anyone I can think of. Godspeed, Jim Martin.

I know you can all do math, but one possible endgame here is that the Dems seat 60 in their caucus come January.

The Dems will let Turncoat Joe keep his chairmanships despite his active anti-Dem campaigning AND his utter failure to use said chairmanship for anything useful during Bush’s presidency.

So, Senate Dems will be allowing Lieberman to keep his plum spot despite the fact that he has been deeply awful in that role, and despite the fact that he endorsed efforts by the GOP to imply that Obama is in league with terrorists, suggested that Obama endangered our troops, and said Obama hasn’t always put the country first.

Worse, Reid is echoing an argument he knows is false: That this is only about retribution. Reid and his fellow Senators have made the political decision to leave Lieberman in a job that he was a disaster at, rather than make the good governmental decision to remove him for the good of the country.

That it was apparently Obama’s decision makes me only slightly less annoyed.

Over the weekend, Mrs Heathen and I were wondering how a modern president engages the electronic world; as if on cue, the Times obliges us. Records-retention and security rules make it difficult for an actual POTUS to carry a Blackberry, apparently; there’s more discussion at the BoingBoing post on the subject.

Frank Rich has much to say on the likely future of the “party of Lincoln.” Hint: the internal Faithful are wildly wrong — and we’re probably worse off for it.

ELECTION junkies in acute withdrawal need suffer no longer. Though the exciting Obama-McCain race is over, the cockfight among the losers has only just begun. The conservative crackup may be ugly, but as entertainment, it’s two thumbs up!

[…]

The Republicans are in serious denial. A few heretics excepted, they hope to blame all their woes on their unpopular president, the inept McCain campaign and their party’s latent greed for budget-busting earmarks.

The trouble is far more fundamental than that. The G.O.P. ran out of steam and ideas well before George W. Bush took office and Tom DeLay ran amok, and it is now more representative of 20th-century South Africa during apartheid than 21st-century America. The proof is in the vanilla pudding. When David Letterman said that the 10 G.O.P. presidential candidates at an early debate looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club,” he was the first to correctly call the election.

On Nov. 4, that’s roughly the sole constituency that remained loyal to the party — minus its wealthiest slice, a previously solid G.O.P. stronghold that turned blue this year (in a whopping swing of 34 percentage points). The Republicans lost every region of the country by double digits except the South, which they won by less than double digits (9 points). They took the South only because McCain, who ran roughly even with Obama among whites in every other region, won Southern whites by 38 percentage points.

Those occasional counties that tilted more Republican in 2008 tended to be not only the least diverse, but also the most rural, least educated and slowest-growing in population. McCain-Palin did score a landslide among white evangelical Christians, though even in that demographic Obama shaved the G.O.P. margin by seven percentage points from 2004.

[…]

In defeat, the party’s thinking remains unchanged. Its leaders once again believe they can bamboozle the public into thinking they’re the “party of Lincoln” by pushing forward a few minority front men or women. The reason why they are promoting Palin and the recently elected Indian-American governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, as the party’s “future” is not just that they are hard-line social conservatives; they are also the only prominent Republican officeholders under 50 who are not white men.

And here’s the completely-full-of-truth money shot:

The good news for Democrats is a post-election Gallup poll finding that while only 45 percent of Americans want to see Palin have a national political future (and 52 percent of Americans do not), 76 percent of Republicans say bring her on. The bad news for Democrats is that these are the exact circumstances that can make Obama cocky and Democrats sloppy. The worse news for the country is that at a time of genuine national peril we actually do need an opposition party that is not brain-dead.

For the Republican Party to avoid brain-death, they pretty much have to tell the religious right to pound sand and adopt actual small-government positions — which means shutting up about gay marriage, immigration, pro-intelligent-design crap, and all the other issues so important to the know-nothing fringe. You see that happening? Me either.

TBogg nails it, on folks on the right complaining about boycotts targeting individuals and businesses who contributed to Prop 8 passage efforts:

The kind of person who contributes money to deny their fellow citizens their civil rights are not someday magically going to be part of the solution: they’re the problem. These are not people to be reasoned with; they’re ignorant, they’re haters and they’re bigots and the only thing people like that understand is power.

So when they stick their noses in other people’s affairs, they forfeit the right to be considered just another “ordinary person”. They’re involved and they would be foolish to expect that those other people in whose private affairs they have meddled wouldn’t return the favor. As they say: you pays your money and you takes your chances.

If you actively support taking away someone’s right to marry, then you absolutely do NOT get to claim some sort of moral high ground or express surprise when the community you’ve attacked decides they want to hit back.

The Mormons had the audacity to issue a statement with these paragraphs:

While those who disagree with our position on Proposition 8 have the right to make their feelings known, it is wrong to target the Church and its sacred places of worship for being part of the democratic process.

Once again, we call on those involved in the debate over same-sex marriage to act in a spirit of mutual respect and civility towards each other. No one on either side of the question should be vilified, harassed or subject to erroneous information.

Really? That’s the angle you’re taking? “Hey, it’s just politics, and it’s inappropriate to retaliate?” No, I don’t think so. Turns out, politics works both ways, and you shouldn’t be surprised that there are consequences to enacting hateful legislation.

What’s really amazing to me is this story. Precis: Mormon musical theater director in California ends up having to resign — surprise! — because it turns out that he donated $1,000 to Prop 8. Dude, WTF? And his sister’s even a lesbian. From his statement, quoted in the linked article:

“I understand that my choice of supporting Proposition 8 has been the cause of many hurt feelings, maybe even betrayal,” Mr. Eckern said. “It was not my intent. I honestly had no idea that this would be the reaction.”

Either this man is an incredibly brazen liar, or he has no empathy whatsoever. Prop 8 was not some abstract piece of legislation; prior to its passage, gay couples could legally marry. After, they cannot. To suggest that he “honestly had no idea” that the people around him affected by it would be feel angry and betrayed by his material support of the measure is simply absurd.

Also, good luck finding theater work now, Mr Eckern. Your donation was a matter of public record already, but now you’ve been on record in the New York Times as a homophobic bigot.

Rolling Stone has much to say on the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP’s electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today’s Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. “Many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo goo’ syndrome — good government,” said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. “They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Today, Weyrich’s vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission’s own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from “unreadability” to changes in a voter’s signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.

[…]

To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. “They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away,” says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was fired in December 2006. “We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years — but I didn’t find one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico.”

There’s a reason Iglesias couldn’t find any evidence of fraud: Individual voters almost never try to cast illegal ballots. The Bush administration’s main point person on “ballot protection” has been Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department attorney who has advised states on how to use HAVA to erect more barriers to voting. Appointed to the Federal Election Commission by Bush, von Spakovsky has suggested that voter rolls may be stuffed with 5 million illegal aliens. In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. According to a recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. “The claim of widespread voter fraud,” Minnite says, “is itself a fraud.”

Go read the whole thing.

“It’s about the human heart.”

Some choice bits:

This isn’t about yelling, and this isn’t about politics, and this isn’t really just about Prop-8. And I don’t have a personal investment in this: I’m not gay, I had to strain to think of one member of even my very extended family who is, I have no personal stories of close friends or colleagues fighting the prejudice that still pervades their lives.

And yet to me this vote is horrible. Horrible. Because this isn’t about yelling, and this isn’t about politics.

This is about the… human heart, and if that sounds corny, so be it.

If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not… understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don’t want to deny you yours. They don’t want to take anything away from you. They want what you want — a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

[…]

I keep hearing this term “re-defining” marriage.

If this country hadn’t re-defined marriage, black people still couldn’t marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal… in 1967. 1967.

The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn’t have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it’s worse than that. If this country had not “re-defined” marriage, some black people still couldn’t marry…black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery. Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not “Until Death, Do You Part,” but “Until Death or Distance, Do You Part.” Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.

You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are… gay.

[…]

What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don’t you, as human beings, have to embrace… that love? The world is barren enough.

It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.

And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?

With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate… this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness — this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness — share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The full Democratic caucus will meet next week to vote on whether or not Joe gets to keep his chairmanship. My gut is that this won’t go Joe’s way, and that he’ll bolt the caucus in a huff. Door. Ass. Bang.

So, I was just wondering:

Our presidential electoral system is kind of weird, and some of its weirdness is based on the idea that it’s valuable to apportion some amount of Electoral College representation based simply on statehood, without regard to population. This means that even the tiniest “state” gets a minimum of 3 EC votes, even if it’s only got a single Representative in the House. It’s probably not absurd to handle Congress this way, given the separation of powers between the Senate and the House, but it’s far from clear that this is a good idea for Presidential elections.

Because low-population, largely rural states are overwhelmingly conservative, this tends to give a small electoral advantage to Republicans. I wondered, then, what if the Electoral College was concerned ONLY with population-based representation? We’d still have the all-or-nothing state-by-state EC system, but without the Senate-based distortion. How might this affect recent races?

In this world, the smallest number of EC electors is 1, not 3 (I’ve given DC 1, since it currently has 3, but has about half the population of another 3-EV state, Montana.) Instead of 538, candidates vie for 436 (435 House members + 1 for DC). The magic number is 219, not 270.

So then came the math. It turns out to be pretty easy to do this, since Wikipedia has all the data a mouse click away. I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that this “New Math” can only affect races where (a) the winner has more states than the loser and (b) the difference in states won is greater than half the electoral college margin of victory. Only one race in the last 50 years would be affected by this, and it’s the same one where we sent the guy with fewer popular votes to Washington. Go figure.

• 2008: It’s not even close, but let’s look anyway. Obama won 365 electoral votes, and McCain 173 — a margin of 68% to 32% in the Electoral College. Obama won 29 states; McCain 22. If we reduce each candidate’s total by (states * 2), the adjusted score is 307 to 129, and the margin of victory changes to 70% to 30%. For 2008, then, the extra weight given to small states wasn’t that big of a factor.

• 2004: Bush won 286 EV, 53% of the EC, and 31 states; Kerry won 251, 47%, and 20. If we apply the same math here, we get Bush 224, Kerry 211, and no electoral change (though a narrower EC race at 51% to 49%). Bush took a 62 EV hit, and Kerry 40, but the real-world margin was too much for the state adjustment to flip the race. The state margin (11) is far less than half the EV margin (40, half of which is 20).

• 2000: Here’s the money shot. Bush won 271 (30 states, and a hair over 50% of the EC) to Gore’s 266 (21 and 49%) (yes, we’re missing an elector because of the rogue dude in Minnesota who voted for John Edwards). Eliminating the small states’ advantage drops Bush to 211, below Gore’s adjusted store of 224 and flipping this hypothetical race even with Bush carrying Florida. As predicted, the difference in states won (30 – 21 = 9) is more than 1/2 the Electoral Margin (271 – 266 = 5).

With that in hand, let’s delve further. Needing the race to be close to be worth analyzing pushes us pretty far back. Clinton won about 70% of the EC in both his elections; George Herbert Walker Bush won with 79%. Reagan famously waltzed off with 91% in ’80 and 98% in ’84. With EC margins like that, the Senatorial noise becomes immaterial.

• 1976: Carter, though, was somewhat closer with 55% of the EC in 1976, 297 to 240 for Gerry Ford. However, Carter won fewer states (24 to 27), so the race can’t flip (just to be clear: it means Ford would take a bigger EV adjustment than Carter).

• Nixon’s 1968 run was also close, with about 56%, but the peculiarities of the year save him: first, he won 32 states and bagged 301 EV — but most significantly the opposition vote was split by Humphrey (Dem, 191 EV, 14 states) and George Wallace (46 EV, 5 states). Ding Nixon his 64 votes and he’s still above the real-world totals of his opponents, so no change here, either.

• We have to go to 1960 for another “close” race: JFK won with 303, 22 states, and 56% of the EV compared to Nixon’s 219 and 26 states. (Harry Byrd won some votes that year, plus we’re far enough back the the total is actual 537, not 538, hence the funny totals.) Again, we can’t flip the race with the new math because (a) the margin’s too big and (b) JFK won with fewer states.

And all of a sudden we’re back in the 1950s. Actually, the forties; the 1948 race was relatively close, but not enough to get interesting. Truman won 303 electoral votes and 28 states; Dewey bagged only 189 and 16 (Strom Thurmond picked up 39 and 4), so no flip here, either.

To find another candidate for adjustment we have to jump back to 1916, with Woodrow Wilson vs. Charles Hughes. Wilson got 277 EV and 30 states; Hughes got 254 and 18. The key rule is, again, if the difference in states is more than 1/2 the EV margin; the state difference is 12, and the EV margin is 23, so we’d expect the adjustment to flip the election. Wilson’s 277 less (2 x 30) is 217; Hughes’ 254 less (2 x 18) is 218, and all of a sudden there’s a new President for the First World War.

It’s clear that the EC kept the popular vote winner from the White House in 2000. It’s interesting to see that a small change to the EV system would rectify that; however, it’s also obvious that the barrier to entry on such a change (depending as it does on supermajority (2/3) votes in both houses of Congress PLUS ratification by 75% of the states) will keep this exercise firmly in the realm of the theoretical.

Sure, the party I was at became an impromptu flag-waving parade after the race was called (we ended up at Rudz, natch), but something even cooler happened in the St Mark’s neighborhood of New York. The assembled crowd spontaneously broke into the National Anthem.

If that doesn’t at least give you goosebumps, you have no soul.

Cartographs of the US electoral map adjusted for population and electoral representation, which gives you an idea how much the whole “small state bias” distorts things.

He’s apparently openly threatening to caucus with the GOP if he loses his committees. Knock yourself out, Joe. The Dem margin is big enough that we don’t need you, and you need a fucking spanking like nobody I’ve ever seen.

Josh Marshall puts it pretty clearly:

I think much of what Lieberman did over the last year was inexcusable. But magnanimity in victory is always a virtue and usually wise. So I don’t think it’s necessary to expel him from the caucus. And perhaps there are some perks of seniority he could be allowed to retain. But allowing him to keep his chairmanship is simply unacceptable. It’s a position the Democrats hold because of the joint efforts of Democrats across the country pulling together to support Democratic policies and ideals and elect Democratic candidates. For Lieberman to enjoy the fruits of that labor after working so hard to stymie that effort would be unconscionable.

Sen. Reid, show your mettle. Kick Joe to the curb. Connecticut will elect another Dem in 4 years, and even if they don’t, you’ll still have the majority.

The Obama campaign has released a set of snapshots taken by a campaign staffer of Obama and his family watching the returns, realizing the result, watching McCain’s speech, and heading out to give his own address. There are several really nice and unposed moments caught there.

You may not have voted for him, but the pictures are fascinating anyway — I don’t recall seeing similar pictures from any other election, and these are in particular neat because the candidate has a young family around him. Check ’em out.

As it turns out, in every election since 1980, each successive Democratic candidate has gotten more (popular) votes than the prior one. Mondale outscored Carter, Dukakis outscored Mondale, Clinton outpolled Dukakis, and then outpolled himself four years later, etc. The line for the Republicans is vastly less consistent.

A reckoning is coming for Joe Lieberman. It’s unlikely the Dems will reach 60 even with him, so for my money I say freeze his sorry ass completely out: no chairs, no nothing. Don’t even let the turncoat bastard speak. Let him vote with the GOP if he wants to; if he does that, he’s unlikely to win his seat back given his constituency. He’s of course free to endorse and campaign for whomever he wants, but he shouldn’t expect the party he shat all over for two years to support him or reward him for that behavior.

At 1:20 in this video, our friend AJ is clapping. In a crowd of 200,000 people in Grant Park, CNN caught a shot of someone we all knew, and 30 people in Jason Nodler’s living room immediately pointed and yelled “THAT’S AJ!”

Did Nate Silver pull it off? The current called-state map looks an awful lot like his last projection. Like, exactly. Being essentially right is one thing; calling 50 states correctly is something else again. If Indiana and Virginia break Dem, he’s done it.

Currently, the closed-projections from major media outlets total 207 electoral votes. This total does not include the 55 votes for California, the 7 for Oregon, and the 11 for Washington, none of which have been even close to competitive. Further, Virginia and Florida are still uncalled, but Pennsylvania and Ohio are in Obama’s column.

We are Done. Oh thank you Jesus, we are done, in so many ways.

The writer is fairly centrist, but has made no bones about his disdain for Bush’s administration. Yesterday, he made his endorsement official. Here are some choice bits, reproduced here because I like them enough I want to make it absurdly easy for as many people as possible to read them:

I endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States and will be voting for him on Tuesday. I heartily encourage you to do so as well, if in fact you have not voted already.

I’m going to vote for him because I believe he is what I think a president should be: Smart, informed, engaged, practical in ideas and in the execution of those ideas, deliberative and as we have seen in this campaign, someone who keeps his head while all those around him are losing theirs. […]

He’s not where he is now because he got lucky. He got there because he worked for it. I mean, holy God, people: He’s a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. Think of what you have to do just to get beyond that here in these United States. I joked the other day that it was a verifiable miracle of St. Obama, but in the real world, it’s no miracle. The man earned being where he is today, and likely where he will be at the end of Tuesday night.

I’m voting for Obama, but I’m also voting against both the Republican Party and John McCain, and voting against both for the same reason: Outside of a drive to win and be in power, there’s just nothing there. […]

… Bush is the standard bearer for the GOP because the GOP wanted him. He was (in what will likely soon be more than one sense of term) the ultimate president for the modern GOP: a genial figurehead for the general population to have its figurative beer with while the “smart guys,” rather less attractive (no one wants to have a beer with Karl Rove), do their thing in the background. Bush was what the GOP wanted him to be and did everything they wanted him to do. Its problem is not that Bush wrecked the GOP brand, but that through him the modern GOP became what it was always going to be, in the end.

I was never going to vote for John McCain, but of all the GOP primary candidates this year, he was the one I would have had the least problem with eventually becoming president. But he lost me with his campaign, which was substanceless, stunt-driven and more focused on trying to scare voters from Obama than on making the case for McCain. I wanted to feel like if McCain won that there would still be enough of a break between his administration and the Bush administration that we wouldn’t continue the downward spiral we’ve been on — that McCain at least would be there at the controls, trying to yank the flaps into a “climb” position. Instead all I got from his campaign was that McCain’s a maverick, and Obama hangs with terrorists and probably wants to eat my children. You know, I’m not stupid. I know when someone’s trying to distract me with handwaving from the fact there’s no there there.

And then there’s the Palin thing, which exposed the bankruptcy of both the McCain campaign and the modern GOP. No one in the world believes that the Palin pick was anything more than a spur-of-the-moment choice, a sop to the GOP base and a transparently cynical bid for the Democratic women still smarting from Clinton’s loss in the primaries, an estimation by McCain’s camp that Palin’s possession of a vagina outweighed the fact that she shared not a single policy with that presidential candidate. […]

But the Palin pick did firm up the support of the GOP base, a fact which should terrify anyone with a working brain. Palin is indisputably the single worst major party candidate for high office in living memory, a proudly ignorant political automaton whose only notable qualities are a pretty face, a sufficient lack of awareness to blind her to her own incompetencies and a quality of ambition that can only be described as voracious. The GOP base should have been insulted that this was all it was given by the McCain campaign; instead it embraced her and has declared her a frontrunner for 2012. Which tells you that the GOP base has learned nothing in the last eight years; Palin, in every way that matters, is nothing more than Bush with boobs. […]

It’s appalling that the GOP base holds up Palin as the sort of person it wants as president of the country, and it points to the sort of intellectual and moral vacuousness that party has that the rest of us simply can’t afford anymore. McCain’s decision to pick her as his running mate is something politics wonks will discuss for decades, one of those credibility-destroying moments that in retrospect simply defies belief.

As for how I felt about it personally, let me put it this way: before the Palin pick, I was going to vote for Obama. After the Palin pick, I was also and most emphatically voting against McCain. The only way Palin should be in the White House is on the public tour.

Unsurprisingly, they’ve endorsed Obama:

IT IS impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls next week the mood will be very different. The United States is unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its self-belief and values are under attack.

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.

[…]

At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies. If only the real John McCain had been running

That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

[…]

The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her just twice.

Ironically, given that he first won over so many independents by speaking his mind, the case for Mr McCain comes down to a piece of artifice: vote for him on the assumption that he does not believe a word of what he has been saying. Once he reaches the White House, runs this argument, he will put Mrs Palin back in her box, throw away his unrealistic tax plan and begin negotiations with the Democratic Congress. That is plausible; but it is a long way from the convincing case that Mr McCain could have made. Had he become president in 2000 instead of Mr Bush, the world might have had fewer problems. But this time it is beset by problems, and Mr McCain has not proved that he knows how to deal with them.

Is Mr Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy is a sham. America’s allies would rally to him: the global electoral college on our website shows a landslide in his favour. At home he would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wound left by America’s history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism.

So Mr Obama’s star quality will be useful to him as president. But that alone is not enough to earn him the job. Charisma will not fix Medicare nor deal with Iran. Can he govern well? Two doubts present themselves: his lack of executive experience; and the suspicion that he is too far to the left.

There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama’s résumé is thin for the world’s biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.

Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.

Over at BoingBoing, we have our attention called to a video wherein Republican vice-presidential nominee complains that Obama will create a socialist state wherein our very freedoms are endangered.

Really? That’s the line you’re going with? Well, Harper’s writer Scott Horton has a bit to say about that:

Does Sarah mean a state:

• That snatches its victims off the street, denies them all form of legal process and whisks them away to secret “blacksites” where they can be tortured using all the techniques described in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon?

• That arrests and prosecutes its political adversaries for imaginary crimes so as to eliminate them from the running in election cycles in which they could do some damage?

• That destroys the careers of professional military men because they got promotions under a prior regime and therefore considers them disloyal?

• That believes it can detain and hold its enemies forever without any charges or any evidence against them, denying them access to courts to prove their innocence?

Because, Sarah, that’s what your party has done for us in just 8 short years.

Remember this? It’s been 8 years. Why not check and see Wassup in 2008? (Widely linked.)

This is fucking priceless:

I’ve been saying bad things about Sarah Palin before right now in the past ago. But that’s only because I thought she was an unqualified, passive-aggressive, hypocritical cunt.

However, I was hit over the head 11 times with an amber paperweight this morning. Then, seventeen minutes ago, I got my head trapped in a big plastic bag, and was not able to get any oxygen into my breath-hole for several minutes. And then I paid the mailman to give me a screwdriver lobotomy.

And so now I see things different and also clearer than before back then.

For first things, everyone who’s laughing about her on the TV with Couric needs to understand that, when it comes to the country’s money and bank outlook, we need to consider what Sarah said about jobs making and also the shoring up of our proud country and the mountains of glory and tradition that we, as a people, have forever held. And don’t forget the health care which for the body of Americans as people and as a whole is critical. Do you remember the people who died in the towers?

It keeps going. Go read the whole thing.

GOP fucktards have stolen or vandalized at least three Obama signs from my brother’s yard; amusingly, this made the local TV news.

Ron Howard would like to talk to you about this election.

Eric Hirshberg over at Huffington Post has a post up, with video, about Conservatives for Change. Watch the video. There’s more at ConservativesForChange.com.

Some of the links on the photo essay I posted earlier have broken; here’s a link to the directory with the photos themselves.

Photojournalist Callie Shell has been following the Obama campaign since the primaries. She’s done some extraordinary work. They’re all good, but there’s something about this one that really gets me.

Following up, I’ll add this mashup someone put together combining one of Shell’s shots with one of Governor Palin and the widely-reported information about the RNC’s $150,000 makeover of the Palin clan.

This is awesome and completely correct:

First, they had their shot at holding power, and they failed. They’ve failed in staying true to their principles of limited government and free markets. They’ve failed in preventing elected leaders of their party from becoming corrupted by the trappings of power, and they’ve failed to hold those leaders accountable after the fact. Congressional Republicans failed to rein in the Bush administration’s naked bid to vastly expand the power of the presidency (a failure they’re going to come to regret should Obama take office in January). They failed to apply due scrutiny and skepticism to the administration’s claims before undertaking Congress’ most solemn task—sending the nation to war. I could go on.

As for the Bush administration, the only consistent principle we’ve seen from the White House over the last eight years is that of elevating the American president (and, I guess, the vice president) to that of an elected dictator. That isn’t hyperbole. This administration believes that on any issue that can remotely be tied to foreign policy or national security (and on quite a few other issues as well), the president has boundless, limitless, unchecked power to do anything he wants. They believe that on these matters, neither Congress nor the courts can restrain him.

That’s the second reason the GOP needs to lose. American voters need to send a clear, convincing repudiation of these dangerous ideas.

FiveThirtyEight.com is the most interesting electoral stats site out there this campaign season, and it should be, given its author’s statistical pedigree. Nate Silver’s day job is in the rarefied world of baseball stats; he works for Baseball Prospectus, who, according to the linked story, have “a reputation in sports-media circles for being unfailingly rigorous, occasionally arrogant, and almost always correct.”

A little background:

The site earned some national recognition back in May, during the Democratic primaries, when almost every other commentator was celebrating Hillary Clinton’s resurgent momentum. Reading the polls, most pundits predicted she’d win Indiana by five points and noted she’d narrowed the gap with Obama in North Carolina to just eight.

Silver, who was writing anonymously as “Poblano” and receiving about 800 visits a day, disagreed with this consensus. He’d broken the numbers down demographically and come up with a much less encouraging outcome for Clinton: a two-point squeaker in Indiana, and a seventeen-point drubbing in North Carolina. On the night of the primaries, Clinton took Indiana by one and lost North Carolina by fifteen. The national pundits were doubly shocked: one, because the results were so divergent from the polls, and two, because some guy named after a chili pepper had predicted the outcome better than anyone else.

Silver and his colleagues, for example, were virtually alone in predicting that now-World Series bound Tampa would win 90 games this year.

Silver’s current projection is a 344 to 193 electoral vote victory for Obama, with 51.1% of the popular vote. Overall, he sees a 93.4% chance of an Obama victory. It changes slightly every day, as his models incorporate more and newer data.

The immediate post-event spin on Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama? Powell’s a racist; them darkies stick together. You can’t make this shit up.

The only reason I keep putting things like this up here is, clearly, because I hate you all.

At YesWeCarve.com, you can see excellent examples of Barackolanterns, and download stencils to make your own. (Thanks, Miche!)

Christopher Buckley, son of right-wing firebrand William F. Buckley, has endorsed Barack Obama.

Of course, he was promptly let go by his father’s magazine as a consequence.

Mr. Buckley said he did not understand the sense of betrayal that some of his conservative colleagues felt, but said that the fury and ugly comments his endorsement generated is “part of the calcification of modern discourse. It’s so angry.” Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan’s quote about the Democrats, Mr. Buckley added, “I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.”

Roseanne Cash tosses her hat in:

In summation, I present myself to the GOP as a woman, and I repeat, woman, who has held a passport for thirty-eight years, a lip gloss-wearing soccer-volleyball-softball-gymnastics mom of five, who can carry a six-pack home to her husband like nobody’s business, whose will is firmly aligned with God’s will, a neo-natal conservative and legally savvy public figure, a border-watching, trigonometry-credited, breastfeeding, BlackBerry-tapping, cat-throwing maverick whose daughters are out of their teens, therefore immune to teenage pregnancy (although this is a private, family matter), and whose dad’s head (or an eerie facsimile) adorns a state airline.

Read the whole thing. It’s hilarious.

A Republican-dominated panel in the Alaskan legislature has determined that Palin illegally abused her gubernatorial powers by trying to force Alaska to fire her ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper.

Which is fine, really, because science hates him right back.

From the Daily Show. Go. Watch. It’s brilliant.

Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley has a radio ad running in Virginia endorsing Barack Obama. (Widely noted; most recently by the Portland Pontiff.)

In recent snippet of interview, Gov. Palin suggested she disagreed with Roe because she was pro life, but also supported the constitutional right to privacy that underpins Roe (and Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird). This suggests a sort of basic confusion about Constitutional law, but never mind that. It also reminds me of something else I’ve been meaning to talk about.

Mainstream pro-life theory attacks the idea of Constitutional privacy as enshrined in these three decisions (and, later, Lawrence v Texas), and their main weapon is the doctine of Constitutional originalism, or the idea that the text of the Constitution must be interprested as normal persons of 1789 would have read it. Adherents to this theory insist that the idea of a penumbra of rights implied in the privacy decisions is invalid, since it’s not part of the original text. (This is tenuous, but stay with me.) (It’s also this theory that suggests to Scalia that torture is not “cruel and unusual punishment” because it’s not punishment; it’s interrogation — and that consequently torture isn’t unconstitutional.)

But here’s the thing: I’ve yet to meet anyone, ever, who holds to this point of view, but also believes abortion ought to be legal. On the contrary, it appears that this POV is adopted exclusively by persons who wish to see an end to safe and legal abortions in this country, and who view this as an issue of paramount importance. (N.B. that the absence of Constitutional privacy doesn’t mean abortion must be illegal; it just means that the government would be free to make laws forbidding it.) This strongly suggests to me a measure of intellectual dishonesty among the originalists — that they have simply picked a philosophical structure that supports their desired outcome. This is certainly convenient for them — and is made more so, and at least slightly respectable by such high-profile proponents as Scalia and his manservant on the Court — but doesn’t suggest overmuch analysis of related ethical or legal questions. Picking an endpoint and eliminating schools of thought until you find one that supports your conclusion is pretty bankrupt — it’s the philosophical equivalent of picking a scientific conclusion and discarding evidence that fails to support it.

So, dear Heathen Nation, find me a pro-choice originalist. I’ll be right here.

…is fucking excellent.

Letterman was supposed to have McCain on last night, but McCain ditched him to “save the country” as part of his campaign-suspension gimmick. Dave was not pleased. Delicious.