You might want to read this article in The Politico by Joel Kotkin about the emerging class war in the United States, and how it will replace the culture war:

Increasing numbers of Americans find it ever more problematic to maintain a “middle class” lifestyle. The current mortgage crisis, which has eroded the value of the most valuable asset of millions of Americans, only exacerbates these concerns. In such a situation, it’s hard to see how micro fractures among ethnic and gender identities will continue to be the defining issues of our politics as they were during the last half of the 20th century.

… [E]conomic issues seem certain to become more important in the next decade. This is a matter for not only older Americans: As the large millennial generation ages, it could well face an increasingly difficult economic climate. In the past, a college education alone has been the sure ticket to upward mobility; in this century, the newest research shows that it no longer guarantees any such thing. Wages for recent college graduates, particularly males, have been dropping since 2000, even as less-educated workers, at least in some places, have done better.

I have trouble believing that this faux-Bruce-Springsteen video is not a hoax, a really bad joke meant to take a jab at Microsoft:

Engadget, however, claims it’s for real–a Microsoft-made video promotion for Vista SP1. Even if it was intentionally made for camp value, it is still cringe-inducing.

The antidote:

Meanwhile, the actual Bruce Sprinsteen, the one with ultimate blue-collar image, has endorsed Obama (“Hi, I’m a Mac” to McCain’s “And I’m a PC”):

LIke most of you, I’ve been following the campaign and I have now seen and heard enough to know where I stand. Senator Obama, in my view, is head and shoulders above the rest.

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where “…nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.”

At the moment, critics have tried to diminish Senator Obama through the exaggeration of certain of his comments and relationships. While these matters are worthy of some discussion, they have been ripped out of the context and fabric of the man’s life and vision, so well described in his excellent book, Dreams From My Father, often in order to distract us from discussing the real issues: war and peace, the fight for economic and racial justice, reaffirming our Constitution, and the protection and enhancement of our environment.

After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project and to lead us into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of moral purpose and of ourselves as Americans.

Over here on E Street, we’re proud to support Obama for President.

Let’s see if that doesn’t carry any weight in Pennsylvania and Indiana.

This on McCain being reported from a new poll:

McCain was seen as a better steward of the economy than either Democrat despite their repeated criticism of his economic credentials. He led Obama by 3 points and Clinton by 5 points on the question of who would best manage the economy.

This despite McCain showing no reason to believe he would be a good steward of the economy, and in fact demonstrating that he would not be. The only thing he might do differently is to not favor pork as much, but with Democrats in control of Congress, he would do that anyway–and would still likely favor his own party’s pork in any case. But McCain wishes not only to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, but to add his own to the pile, while allowing the middle class to lose their homes while he bailed out those who foreclose on them.

So why is McCain seen as a better steward? For no better reason than he is a Republican, and Republicans–completely contrary to all evidence–are still considered better on the economy. Yet another baseless favor McCain will enjoy, like being seen as stronger on campaign finance reform despite having violated federal laws on campaign finance and surrounded himself with lobbyists, or like he is considered strong on defense and foreign policy despite having authored the failed surge, promised an endless war in Iraq and a new costly war in Iran, and so much more to his detriment. He is seen as a centrist maverick when he is really a strong conservative who readily toadies to the most extreme elements of his party. And so forth and so on.

Kevin Drum put it succinctly and well:

The results are simple: Democratic presidents have consistently higher economic growth and consistently lower unemployment than Republican presidents. If you add in a time lag, you get the same result. If you eliminate the best and worst presidents, you get the same result. If you take a look at other economic indicators, you get the same result. There’s just no way around it: Democratic administrations are better for the economy than Republican administrations.

Democratic presidents generate more jobs–even the worst Democrat in the past century has outperformed the best Republican. Deficits fall under Democrats, and skyrocket under Republicans. The rich get just as rich under both, but while the middle class and the poor suffer under Republicans, they do very well under Democrats. While Democrats keep spending down to a dull roar, Republicans spend like there’s no tomorrow; while Democrats responsibly try to find ways to pay for what they spend, Republicans carelessly pile up massive debts which cripple the economy, costing us $469 billion this year alone just to pay interest [OMB figures, Excel file] on our Republican-generated debt. Without the interest payments on the Reagan-Bush-Bush deficits alone, we would have a balanced budget right now.

The facts are clear for anyone to see: elect a Democrat, and your income will go up, jobs will increase, the deficit will fall, the economy will do better. Elect a Republican, the reverse will happen. And yet, millions of Americans continue to vote against their own financial interests based on nothing more than a fairy tale, a PR sham job.

How could anyone resist this sales pitch?

This is the outside of a used motorcycle shop in Ikebukuro.

Actually, it refers to prices they offer to buy bikes, so in fact, it makes sense. But unless you know what the shop does, the sign looks like a huge mistake.

In Akita Prefecture, Japan, there is a measure coming before the legislature to ban door-to-door sales to minors and the elderly. Naturally, several categories of businesses (financial, insurance, and retail, according to the report–I’m surprised that newspapers were not mentioned here, as they do tons of door-to-door sales) are whining, saying that this will ruin their businesses. All I have to say is, if these businesses cannot function without conning people of limited capacity into buying their product, then they deserve to fail. Me, I’m waiting for them to go all the way and give “no solicitors” signs the force of law. Oh, wait, they’re doing that too!

The ordinance will also ban door-to-door sales of financial products in which the principal is not guaranteed, including investment trusts, stocks and variable pension insurance, for all people.

Under a proposed registration system, sales people will be banned from visiting homes of consumers who have registered with the prefectural government as people who do not want sales staff to visit. The registered consumers can also display a sign at their homes to keep away sales people.

Yayy! I wonder what real estate prices are like in Akita? Better yet, how about Tokyo legislators getting off their butts? Next: start punishing people who fill your mailbox with ads. Meanwhile, they can similarly outlaw NHK collectors, now that the politicians are calling for NHK to drop all pretenses and become an official propaganda arm for the ruling party. Yeah, I’d love to be forced to fund that, thanks.

(Hat tip to f*cked gaijin)

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“Liberal” (turncoat) Joe Lieberman wonders aloud (on Fox Noise) if Obama is a Marxist. Um, yeah, right.

Bonus: Andrew Sullivan points out that in 2006, Lieberman loved Obama, inviting Obama to speak for him in Connecticut. Obama held no different stands then relative to now, so apparently Lieberman loves Marxists. Er, potential Marxists.

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John McCain, playing up his imprisonment and torture on the campaign trail, also had this to say:

We cannot ever, in my view, torture any American, that includes waterboarding.

Apparently, everyone else in the world is fair game.

Obama, meanwhile, says this:

We have to be clear and unequivocal. We do not torture, period. … Our government does not torture. That should be our position. That will be my position as president. That includes, by the way, renditions. We don’t farm out torture. We don’t subcontract torture.

I’m glad that McCain’s impressive foreign relations credentials have not turned him into a wishy-washy hypocrite.

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Wow. They’re calling it “Bittergate.” Also a “huge political firestorm.” Certainly, Obama suggesting that Pennsylvanians are bitter is not nearly as newsworthy as John McCain violating campaign finance laws that carry a five-year prison sentence, or revelations that the Bush administration approved the crushing of children’s testicles at the highest levels. Yeah, calling Pennsylvanians “bitter” was way out of line, and I can easily see such a huge gaffe wiping those other stories clear off the media’s radar altogether.

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, they tend to agree with Obama:

As a native-born, small-town Pennsylvanian, a son of native-born, small-town Pennsylvania parents – one from the coal region, one from Lancaster County – let me assure you that the so-called offensive, condescending things Barack Obama said about the people I come from are basically right on target.

“Bitter” perhaps best describes my late mother, an angry Irish Catholic who absolutely clung to her religion.

Dad, also a journalist, wasn’t really bitter as far as I know, but he sure liked to hunt.

So, despite carping from Hillary Clinton and annoying yapping from her surrogates (really, it’s like turning on the lights at night in a puppy farm), I take no offense.

What’s offensive to me is suggesting that small-town, working-class, gun-toting and/or religious Pennsylvanians are somehow injured by a politician’s words.

Are you kidding me?

Indeed.

Here’s a hypothetical I’d like to ask those in the audience who are pro-gun: if a weapon were developed that would be an effective stun weapon, in essence knocking someone unconscious but not killing them, and therefore would be safer in the home for children and could not be used easily for suicides, especially if such a weapon could more reliably subdue an intruder than a traditional firearm, would you be willing to replace your gun with such a weapon? And if not, why not?

Same for hunting: let’s say there was a weapon which could act like a rifle, but instead of shooting a bullet, it would instead shoot a small cloud of paralyzing darts, like a flechette gun. It would instantly drop an animal unconscious, and the hunter could either (a) count it as a “kill,” and move on to let the animal recover, or (b) walk up to the animal and slaughter it while unconscious. Would you be willing to give up a hunting rifle in exchange for such a weapon? Again, if not, why not?

The point being to ascertain, of course, if it is actually home/self defense and hunting which are the issues, or whether the issue is wider than that.

There has been a lot of talk about how the sound bites will hurt Obama, from the endless loop in the media about Wright and “God Damn America,” to Obama’s own words about Americans being bitter and taking refuge in guns and god. Somehow I never thought that these things would hurt Obama in the long run, but it was hard for me to put my finger on exactly why.

Having just watched Obama in the “Compassion Forum” on CNN, it hit me as to why Obama will survive these attacks against him: eventually people who hear these sound bites will hear Obama speak more at length, and that will burn away all the damage done by these attacks.

What it comes down to is this: the real Obama is not compatible with the version of Obama portrayed in these sound bites. They cannot be reconciled. McCain and Clinton can fall from their own actions and words because they are applicable. We hear McCain saying we could be in Iraq for 100 years, and it is believable. Despite his words and past actions on campaign finance, the fact that he is neck-deep in lobbyists and has violated campaign finance law can only hurt him more. We see Hillary and the lengths she will go to for her own sake at the expense of others, and it will stick.

But what the sound bites try to do to Obama is to make him out to be the kind of person which is contradicted by his manner and speech when you see him in action. The “bitter” comment idea is to try to make him out to be an elitist who sees the voters as hicks and rednecks–but listen to him at the compassion forum and that impression is so far from what you can clearly see him to be, it is impossible to maintain the idea that the sound bites were somehow accurate. The comments of Wright may be one thing, but you listen to Obama for more than a few minutes and you can clearly see that Wright’s speech is light-years from where Obama is.

An attack against an individual is only as effective as it is believable after having seen and heard the candidate yourself. Kerry was stodgy enough that you could maybe buy into the claims against him; Gore, with his debate sighs and wooden manner, was believable in the role of prevaricator. In contrast, Reagan didn’t seem like a liar or a front, which contributed to his “teflon” status. In each of these cases, the public image contradicted the reality, but the image stuck because people could witness the politicians and believe the images applied.

The Obama that people have seen and eventually will see simply is not consistent with the elitist, condescending, “Muslim” foreign snob his opponents have been trying to paint him as. Were they to try to paint him a slick huckster, that might possibly fit the image–“oh, he talks sweet, but he doesn’t mean any of it” could possibly sell to some people. But that’s not what is being sold. If you want to lie about someone and make people believe a good person is really bad, or that a bad person is really good, you have to come up with a lie that will not melt away as soon as people see and hear the person.

A few days ago, Obama got into trouble for making this comment about what people in Pennsylvania and the midwest do when they feel abandoned by politicians in Washington:

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The criticism of this would have to be a bit nuanced, and it is: Clinton was more roundabout, and criticized Obama for saying that Americans are “bitter” when she says they’re not; McCain criticized Obama for being “elitist” and “condescending,” which is closer to the point. What they want to say but can’t directly is that Obama’s statement sounded like he was calling folks in that region rednecks who are all about god and guns, who are protectionist and don’t like immigrants. To say that directly about Obama’s remarks would be a bit too much, as it would provoke closer analysis of what he said and a more clear defense of it. Instead, they dance around it so that just the quick clip out of context and no analysis gets played again and again, allowing people to make the inference themselves.

Obama’s comment was indeed pretty sloppy, and did not sound good at all; in a follow-up, he expressed himself much better:

So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on.

This is not a politician “clarifying” themselves by essentially completely remaking what they said, or just claiming they were “misunderstood” and leaving it at that. When you look at his original statement, the sense of what he said was fully there–it was simply said in a truncated way, as if Obama had the idea in his head, but used a shorter version that came out sounding wrong; taken out of context and not considered fully, it sounds the way his opponents want people to think it sounds.

The truth is, Obama’s statement is 100% true: people were disgusted by not having a good choice to vote for, so instead they voted on negatives, issues ginned up to play on their fears, and that’s how Republicans won those elections. Obama is right, that is exactly what happened.

For those of you who prefer to read comments in fuller context, here are wider transcripts containing the above quotes (highlighted in bold); the first:

So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people are most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre…they’re misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ That’s…there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today – kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.

Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long. They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.

But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide healthcare for every American.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you’ll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.

And the second, where he clarifies, explains, and responds to McCain and Clinton:

When I go around and I talk to people there is frustration and there is anger and there is bitterness. And what’s worse is when people are expressing their anger then politicians try to say what are you angry about? This just happened – I want to make a point here today.

I was in San Francisco talking to a group at a fundraiser and somebody asked how’re you going to get votes in Pennsylvania? What’s going on there? We hear that’s its hard for some working class people to get behind your campaign. I said, “Well look, they’re frustrated and for good reason. Because for the last 25 years they’ve seen jobs shipped overseas. They’ve seen their economies collapse. They have lost their jobs. They have lost their pensions. They have lost their healthcare.

And for 25, 30 years Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said we’re going to make your community better. We’re going to make it right and nothing ever happens. And of course they’re bitter. Of course they’re frustrated. You would be too. In fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing happened across the border in Decatur. The same thing has happened all across the country. Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you. And so people end up- they don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington. So I made this statement– so, here’s what rich. Senator Clinton says ‘No, I don’t think that people are bitter in Pennsylvania. You know, I think Barack’s being condescending.’ John McCain says, ‘Oh, how could he say that? How could he say people are bitter? You know, he’s obviously out of touch with people.’

Out of touch? Out of touch? I mean, John McCain—it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem and to come up with a plan for it, and he’s saying I’m out of touch? Senator Clinton voted for a credit card-sponsored bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people to get out of debt after taking money from the financial services companies, and she says I’m out of touch? No, I’m in touch. I know exactly what’s going on. I know what’s going on in Pennsylvania. I know what’s going on in Indiana. I know what’s going on in Illinois. People are fed-up. They’re angry and they’re frustrated and they’re bitter. And they want to see a change in Washington and that’s why I’m running for President of the United States of America.

Followup: Josh Marshall posted this video of Obama in 2004 giving nearly the identical message, again put in less-twistable words:

For those of you who have not been following the story in P.Z. Myer’s blog Pharyngula, there is a “documentary” out called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed which is essentially a brazenly slanted and strongly dishonest “Intelligent Design” propaganda film, hosted by one of the “theory’s” most prominent proponents, Ben Stein. From the very start, the entire project was a sham. Contacting various scientists and others who are proponents of evolution, an organization calling itself “Rampart Films” asked them if they would like to be interviewed for a film titled Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion–a very reasonable-sounding title. A search on the organization’s web site at the time would have brought forth this blurb:

Crossroads – The Intersection of Science and Religion:

It’s been the central question of humanity throughout the ages: How in the world did we get here? In 1859 Charles Darwin provided the answer in his landmark book, “The Origin of Species.” In the century and a half since, biologists, geologists, physicists, astronomers and philosophers have contributed a vast amount of research and data in support of Darwin’s idea. And yet, millions of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other people of faith believe in a literal interpretation that humans were crafted by the hand of God. This conflict between science and religion has unleashed passions in school board meetings, courtrooms, and town halls across America and beyond.

Indeed, this sounds like a very reasonable presentation of the issue in a fair, unbiased way. The scientists agreed to be interviewed. However, once the interviews were procured, the name of the production company was switched, and the title of the movie and its summary changed to:

Ben Stein, in the new film EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed; His heroic and, at times, shocking journey confronting the world’s top scientists, educators and philosophers, regarding the persecution of the many by an elite few. Ben travels the world on his quest, and learns an awe-inspiring truth…that bewilders him, then angers him…and then spurs him to action! Ben realizes that he has been “Expelled,” and that educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired – for the “crime” of merely believing that there might be evidence of “design” in nature, and that perhaps life is not just the result of accidental, random chance. To which Ben Says: “Enough!” And then gets busy. NOBODY messes with Ben.

A slight change in tone, one should admit. When Myers and others’ interviews were put into the film, they were presented not only out of context, but in a completely new one: their filmed answers (shot in a style as if they had to be filmed with a hidden camera) were intercut with footage of goose-stepping Nazi storm troopers. You can guess where things went from there.

Basically, the film does what ID’ers generally do: present no actual evidence for their own argument (not possible, because there is none), but instead attempt to expose the “fallacies” in evolutionary theory (all such claims are demonstrably false) whilst trying to cast evolution and “Darwinists” (are the filmmakers “Yahwehists”?) as responsible for every reprehensible person, organization, and event in history.

A recent development is the lengthy review by Scientific American which, predictably, rips the filmmakers a new hole in their space-time continuum. A short excerpt:

Like the decision to call evolution Darwinism, the omission of science from Expelled was a deliberate choice. In fact, it was crucial to the film’s strategy. Because they know Americans revere freedom of speech and fairness, the producers cast the conflict between evolution and ID as purely a struggle between worldviews—a difference of opinions, a battle of ideologies—in which one side is censoring the other. They know that the public will instinctively want to defend the underdog, especially when that opinion aligns with the religious beliefs many of them already share.

It is a terrific strategy, but with one caveat: that airy skirmish of opinions must never, ever touch the ground of solid evidence. Because if it does, if viewers are ever allowed to notice that evolution is supported by mountains of tangible, peer-reviewed evidence gathered by generations of scientists, whereas ID has little more than a smattering of vanity-press pamphlets from a handful of cranks… the bubble pops.

Expelled is all about how science should not reject people with ID “theories.” The filmmakers must therefore stop you from ever asking, Why?—because even children understand that in science, two ideas are not equally good if one of them is wrong. Some of the ideas fluffing up ID are demonstrably wrong; the rest are often described as “not even wrong” because they are so untestable or irreconcilable with the rest of science.

It was hard to choose just that one snippet because the entire review is excellent, going to great lengths to show how completely full of BS the film and its creators are, with Scientific American using as much evidence to prove their point as the filmmakers do not use to not prop up their own.

For more on the general subject, check out the Index to Creationist Claims, which exhaustively shoots down every creationist and ID myth and lie; the PBS documentary Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (the entire documentary is viewable online, and it is excellent); my discussion of the reactions to that documentary; the site Expelled: Exposed, which covers reviews and other coverage of the “documentary”; and (again) P.Z. Myers’ blog, Pharyngula.

You know how Bush (along with his supporters) likes to say that history will judge him? (No doubt in an attempt to delay judgment till well after he’s dead.) Well, the early verdict is in, and it doesn’t look too good for him. 109 noted historians, among them Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winners, were asked to judge Bush, and fully 61% call him the “worst in the nation’s history.”

However, 35% of the respondents had a more favorable impression, saying that he ranked only somewhere among the worst ten presidents (though a few of those said that only James Buchanan saved Bush from coming in dead last). Others in that 35% credited their generosity to a hesitancy to decide too soon: “It is a bit too early to judge whether Bush’s presidency is the worst ever,” said one historian; “though it certainly has a shot to take the title. Without a doubt, it is among the worst.”

In fact, only 4% of the respondents ranked Bush among the 2nd-to-30th group, and half of them–two historians–dared call Bush’s tenure a success.“

It’s not as if these people did not explain their reasoning, either:

”No individual president can compare to the second Bush,“ wrote one. ”Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.“

”With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,“ said another historian. ”When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of area: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.“

One historian indicated that his reason for rating Bush as worst is that the current president combines traits of some of his failed predecessors: ”the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover. . . . . God willing, this will go down as the nadir of American politics.“ Another classified Bush as ”an ideologue who got the nation into a totally unnecessary war, and has broken the Constitution more often than even Nixon. He is not a conservative, nor a Christian, just an immoral man . . . .“ Still another remarked that Bush’s ”denial of any personal responsibility can only be described as silly.“

”It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,“ concluded one respondent. ”His domestic policies,“ another noted, ”have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.“

”George Bush has combined mediocrity with malevolent policies and has thus seriously damaged the welfare and standing of the United States,“ wrote one of the historians, echoing the assessments of many of his professional colleagues. ”Bush does only two things well,“ said one of the most distinguished historians. ”He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.“

And there’s more. But I think that covers the high points.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if these are just unfortunate errors, or if they are done by design. Today’s entrant: a shoehorn bought at a 100-yen shop:

It doesn’t seem like it’s supposed to be that way, but come on… could this have really gone all the way through the design process without anyone saying, “hey, that looks kind of phallic, doesn’t it?”

Via Think Progress: The New York Times reported that of the Iraqi troops that went to fight in Basra, fully 1,000 either deserted or refused to fight, including dozens of officers and “at least two senior field commanders.” Newt Gingrich complained angrily to Alan Colmes:

Let me give you an example, Alan, of the stunning bias of the American news media. 15,000 Iraqi troops went in to Basra, 1,000 of them didn’t fight very well. 14,000 of them fought very well and, in fact, were defeating the militias. Guess what the report essentially was in the elite news media? It was the 1,000 that didn’t fight very well. And the 14,000 that were risking their lives on behalf of their own country, without American forces present, didn’t get very much credit.

“Stunning bias,” he says–to report that in its first major test, the Iraqi military suffered a 7% desertion/mutiny rate, including two senior field commanders? Either Newt Gingrich has such low standards and expectations for the Iraqi military that he expects such horrific rates of insubordination to be considered normal, or he’s doing what he does best: playing the “Liberal Media” card to make an embarrassment to the Republican party seem like it’s not nearly as bad as it is. And of course, the latter is true.

This is the essence of the entire “Liberal Media” lie: it is a strategy to change the rules of the game and to call a failure a success by claiming that the referees are playing unfairly. Of course a 7% desertion/mutiny rate is newsworthy; imagine if 7% of U.S. troops did that–it would be considered unthinkable. What if, when the U.S. had about 150,000 troops in Iraq during the surge, about 10,000 of them deserted or refused to do their jobs? Including a few hundred officers and a couple of generals? Could we criticize the press for covering that astounding news, and not instead focusing on the 93% of the soldiers who didn’t desert? Certainly, the Iraqi military is not up to that standard–and that’s precisely the story, that the Iraqi military is not operating up to snuff.

This is bad for Republicans, who have tried to perpetuate the fiction that Iraq is shaping up, that the government is in control, that their military is up to the challenge, that things are progressing so our troops can eventually come home, or at least some of them, and the rest won’t have to take the brunt of the combat in Iraq. News that the Iraqi military, after years of training and building up, still suffers such high desertion rates, belies that fictional portrayal, and makes Republicans who say otherwise look bad. So naturally party hacks like Gingrich have to come forward and make the same old tired claim that it’s not really so bad, it’s just that big, mean liberal media trying to make things look bad.

Remember back in the early days of the war, when Republicans tried the same thing? They protested against the liberally-biased media only focusing on the mass slaughter and deaths of American soldiers, when there were all of those new schools being opened! The irony was that the reporters actually wanted to cover those school openings–but the U.S. military warned them not to, because reports on such events would simply make the facilities a target for militias; otherwise, reporters found that going to such events was far too dangerous for them just in terms of falling prey to violence on the streets. And, as it turns out, such repairs to Iraqi infrastructure were unsuccessful overall–even after the Mahdi Army cease fire, things have continued to get worse and worse for Iraqis.

It is an old standard Republican tactic to claim that the media is slanted, and is only reporting the bad news and not the good. And it is as dishonest a lie now as it ever has been.

Obama would be disappointed:

This was taken at a pastry shop I always pass when I visit my doctor’s office. In case it isn’t apparent, this is supposed to be a sign stating that the cashier can’t make change without a purchase. Funny thing is, you see these signs a lot in Japan. For some strange reason, most are bilingual, though most other signs in supermarkets (except those for style or display) are not–I guess they must get a lot of foreigners asking for change or something. But the weird thing is, I don’t think that I have ever seen a sign stating a no-change policy at a cash register in Japan that was worded correctly. Every such sign I have seen has English which is wrong in some fashion–most often the noun-verb confusion seen here.

There’s an old saying: a man with one clock always knows what time it is; a man with two clocks never knows what time it is.

Well, in the race for Pennsylvania, we’ve got a good half-dozen clocks, easy. Here are seven polls that have come out in the past week or so:

Rasmussen: Clinton +5
SurveyUSA: Clinton +18
ARG: Tied
Quinnipac: Clinton +6
InsiderAdvantage: Clinton +3
Muhlenberg: Clinton +10
PPP: Obama +2

So, either Pennsylvanians are shifting massively on a near-daily basis, or some of these polls are figuring things wrong–unless the margin of error spans a full 20%. Worse, any poll relative to its own precursor might say things are moving in opposite directions; SurveyUSA has Clinton surging ahead 6 points over her last poll, while PPP shows Obama surging by 18 points. Rassmussen has virtually unchanged numbers over the same time span, whereas Quinnipac shows Hillary gaining 3 points, and ARG has Obama gaining 12 points.

In short, these numbers are all over the place. One can only guess that each pollster is making different adjustments to the data, trying to factor in race, gender, age, the new population of recently-registered voters, etc., and coming to different conclusions about who will come out and in what strength. If the state were an open primary, things would probably look even more crazy, I’m guessing.

I am kind of surprised at the continued talk about having Condi Rice run as VP with John McCain. Why? Is Rice so popular? Does she have such a huge following? This is a person who is so integrally involved in the George W. Bush administration, first as National Security Advisor, then as Secretary of State, that you might as well have Bush himself run as McCain’s VP. Nothing would signal a stark continuation of Bush’s policies and failures more than having Rice on the ticket–and along with that, the administration’s sub-30% popularity rating. Rice’s personal ratings have been higher–around the 50% mark–but that may well reflect her image relative to the Bush administration, rather than viewed from a perspective of her having come from that administration.

Coming on as a VP candidate, Rice would carry with her the baggage of Bush, like a defense witness opening the door to a whole new line of questioning. Obama would be able to smash such a ticket with every failure of the past eight years. Rice would really not add anything substantial–McCain is already supposed to have (note: supposed to have, not actually have) foreign policy and security credentials that Rice would not be able to add to.Whatever positives she brings in experience are more than dragged down by the heavy debacles of the past two terms; Rice has no sterling accomplishments to glide on, nothing that makes her stand out except her experience. And if Obama wins the nomination, then he’ll have shown that claims of experience are not enough to turn the trick.

So why, again and again and again, does Rice’s name come up in conservative circles above anyone else’s? The answer, of course, is so blindingly obvious that one really does not have to say it. Republicans have been trying to paint the Obama campaign in racial terms, claiming that his color is really the only important thing about him. When it comes down to it, that’s simply the way they think… and it shows in their enthusiasm for an otherwise unappealing VP choice.

I posted a review of Apple’s “Numbers” software last August:

I haven’t used Numbers yet in a real-world situation, but will over the next semester as I use it to calculate grades in my classes. I am sure there’s a lot more good and not-so-good to be found yet–missing features, extra touches, and so forth. But from just playing around with it for a few days, I am more than ready to dump Excel and work exclusively with Numbers. And with Numbers topping off the iWork suite, I find myself considering simply ditching MS Office altogether and switching completely over to iWork (except for when I have to teach Office in my Computer course).

Let it not be said that I readily admit when I’m wrong. Sure, I’ll usually put up a fight, but when there’s no doubt, there’s no doubt. And I was wrong about Numbers: now that I have used it in real-world situations, I can see that it’s not quite ready for prime time.

And the kicker of it is, it’s in the simple stuff where Numbers falls short. Take, for example, the fact that in Numbers, you can hide columns and rows individually, but you can’t unhide them individually. When working with my class grades (as I just finished doing today), I hid a number of columns, all across the spreadsheet. In Excel, if I want to unhide specific columns, I just select the columns around that one and select “Unhide,” and out it comes. In Numbers: you must unhide every single column in a spreadsheet, or none at all. Which means that if I want to unhide a single column, I have to choose “Unhide All Columns”–I have to bring all of them out, then go about re-hiding all the ones I don’t need, a laborious project. And that’s just stupid–Apple should not have overlooked such an obvious function. Not to mention that there is no menu bar selection for hiding and unhiding, meaning you cannot assign keyboard shortcuts for either command–a big shortcoming for me, as I use those features regularly.

Another example is how you can change formulas. In Excel, when you select a formula, you can see the referenced cells outlined–but then you can grab the outlines and change them, and the formula changes in kind. In Numbers, you can’t do that–you can see the referenced cells as shaded, but you cannot then grab them and change them–instead, you have to re-type the formula itself. Why not do things the easier way?

Numbers
Excel

The strange thing is, these go against Apple’s style, which is to do things more intuitively. These are not arcane features used only by power users, they are basic features that should not have been missed. There are still more intuitive bits in Numbers, like the ability I described last August, where you grab basic functions from the sidebar and drag them to make an easy calculation on the spreadsheet. But the two problems I outlined above are exactly that kind of feature–the easier, more natural, intuitive way of working that Apple should do better, but in this version of Numbers, Apple does very much worse. I can only hope these are oversights, soon to be rectified. But for now, they get in the way far too much, and make using the Apple program difficult and unwieldy.

There are also bugs in the program. For example, I can use the Fill handle to repeat a number, equation, or anything else downward–but not upward. Again, stupid–it should go both ways. Also, when you are in another app and want to go back into Numbers, you naturally click anywhere on the Numbers window that is visible–but this results in the cell you happened to click getting highlighted, as opposed to Excel (and most other apps) which ignores that first app-switching click, keeping the cell that you had left highlighted still in focus–a much better and more intuitive result.

Otherwise, Numbers just feels sluggish. You click, and it takes a second to react. You open a document, and it takes too long to open. The column- and row-manipulation arrows don’t appear as quickly as they should, and are harder to select than they should be. The lack of WYSIWYG font menus doesn’t help, either.

With Numbers being still in version 1.0, I guess I should not be so surprised–it still has a good ways to go, a long lag behind Excel’s functionality, But that doesn’t help me do my work. Sadly, I’ll have to go back to Excel–somewhat but not terribly improved in its 2008 reworking–to do my grunt work, at least until Apple does a lot more to get things right.

Side note: the first post to this blog using blog software was five years ago to this day. Not my first blog post ever, though–that was August 5th, 2002, just shy of a year before I started nonstop blogging, and I was coding the pages by hand then. Reading it, can you tell I was upset about something?

Obama has now led in the Gallup tracking poll for 15 days, the longest stretch he’s maintained to date (Obama has held an unnaturally steady 49% for five days). Previously, he had held the lead for 17 days in the latter part of February, but Hillary had jumped a point ahead on one day and tied him for the lead on another day, breaking the stretch. During Obama’s February lead, he was ahead of Hillary an average of 3.7% per day; in Obama’s latest stretch, he has led Hillary by an average of 4.6%, including a 10% lead where Obama sat at 52% (on March 29th), his highest lead in the race so far, a number Hillary herself enjoyed for only one day in her campaign (on February 5th) before Obama started seriously challenging her nationally.

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MoveOn.org has compiled a top-ten list of facts everyone should know about John McCain:

10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don’t):

1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.

4. McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”

5. The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.

6. He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.

7. Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”

8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.

9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”

10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0–yes, zero–from the League of Conservation Voters last year.

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Obama on Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science:

Q: York County was recently in the news for a lawsuit involving the teaching of intelligent design [in Dover, PA]. What’s your attitude regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools?

A: “I’m a Christian, and I believe in parents being able to provide children with religious instruction without interference from the state. But I also believe our schools are there to teach worldly knowledge and science. I believe in evolution, and I believe there’s a difference between science and faith. That doesn’t make faith any less important than science. It just means they’re two different things. And I think it’s a mistake to try to cloud the teaching of science with theories that frankly don’t hold up to scientific inquiry.”

Well said.

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Finally, some black clergymen gather and discuss Obama and the Wright controversy. Some interesting stuff in there. The first quote:

Rev. Earl Blackwell of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Coatesville: Just speaking personally, the controversy with Wright was created by the media. You can take excerpts from my sermons, and I would be considered a Rev. Wright. But when you listen to the whole content of his sermons, he was speaking directly to the prejudiced, racist, biased community of our nation. And what he was saying, in fact, was generally the truth. The thing is we need to start facing is the reality of situations rather than running from them … What is also significant is that the media would pick that as some way to degrade or make a negative about Obama, and he wasn’t even there, sitting in the congregation. He’s never endorsed his pastor to be his spokesman. For the media to pick and nick, that only encourages me even more to push and prod forward with the support of Sen. Obama.

Read the rest.

I was going to post that they can take his gun away now, but I see that thousands of others have already seen the obvious joke there and beaten me to it.

Final exams have finished this semester, but I still have quite a lot of grading left to do by Monday. Didn’t get much done today because of a doctor’s appointment and a school event–a local fair where the college could put up a table and try to sign people up for our evening classes. It was free for us because we advertise in the local newsletter, and we got about a dozen bites and maybe a chance at better publicity for the school after talking to a local filming team. But I was tasked to put together a 5-minute movie showcasing the school, and that took up all of yesterday evening and night. So tomorrow and Monday will be mostly for getting those grades done. After that, there are various events, but I’ll have much of the month off.

That said, let’s look at some bits & pieces from today’s political news.

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Clinton finally released her tax records, and with them revealed the reason she’s likely been reluctant to have them out there: the Clintons have gotten stinking rich since leaving the White House. $109 million in eight years. Makes it a bit harder to make blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania believe that you feel their pain. And the tax records are not even complete–they filed for an extension for 2007, so much of what happened in that year will likely remain a mystery.

The papers mention that the Clintons gave more than the Obamas to charity as a percent of their overall income, but it’s a lot easier to give 9.5% of $14 million per year and enjoy the remaining $12 million-plus, than it is to give the same from an income of half a million per year while you’re still paying off massive college loans. The Clinton’s $109 million makes the Obama’s $3.9 million seem paltry in comparison.

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Another thing that could give Clinton a harder time in Pennsylvania: Mark Penn, her chief campaign strategist, has been lobbying for the Columbians to get them a trade deal Clinton says she opposes. Penn called it an “error in judgment,” an was successfully able to spin the story to prominently mention that Hillary opposes what he was trying to lobby for.

Remember, Obama got slammed in the media for a good week or so when a low-level advisor was characterized in notes taken by a conservative foreign government as saying that Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric on the trail should not be taken so seriously. This was successfully spun by Clinton and the media to mean “Obama lied on NAFTA and will screw all you hard-workng Ohioans.” This despite the fact that the context of the whole memo more or less followed exactly what Obama had been promising publicly and indicated no contradiction–and then there was the fact that Hillary was the first one reported by Canadians as saying she was not really against NAFTA.

And let’s not forget what Hillary said back then:

I would ask you to look at this story and substitute my name for Sen. Obama’s name and see what you would do with this story… Just ask yourself [what you would do] if some of my advisers had been having private meetings with foreign governments.

Um… yeah, what would we do, Hillary?

However, Clinton seems to be getting yet another break in the media (they don’t want her campaign to die, it would be less interesting and would not sell as many ads that way), as her chief advisor, a major player in her campaign, lobbies for a trade deal beneficial to a foreign government–and the MSM barely pays notice. This should be twice the embarrassment for Clinton that the Canadian thing was for Obama, but so far, not much is being said that’s going to hurt her too much. Most stories bear headlines that stress Penn’s “apology” and Clinton’s opposition to such a deal. Strange Obama did not get the same break when something far less troubling happened to him before a big blue-collar primary.

Not that this will help Clinton in Pennsylvania, of course.

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More and more, it seems like Clinton supporters are catching on to the fact that Hillary’s chances of winning are close to zero, and that her campaign style is killing Democratic chances in the general election. More and more Democrats are edging away from her campaign, some even calling outright for fellow Clinton supporters to get behind Obama and show a unified front. Meanwhile, Obama is steadily chipping away at Clinton’s once-formidable 20-point lead in Pennsylvania; most polls have Obama behind by only single digits, a few have him almost in a statistical dead heat, and one even puts Obama ahead in the Keystone state.

Already Obama is seeing more support–Jimmy Carter, for example, left little doubt that he will pledge his superdelegate vote for Obama. And Hillary is starting to hurt even more in the pocketbook, as she raises less relative to Obama than before, and is said to be in serious debt while Obama’s coffers overflow.

If Obama even comes within a few points in Pennsylvania, Clinton’s support will probably begin to collapse–and if Obama wins there, more people will probably forego their reticence in calling for Hillary to step down.

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McCain, meanwhile, is returning about $3 million in donations, as the media reports that he is “considering” public funding. But this does not mean that he has realized he cannot withdraw from public financing for the primary season and is making sure he stays within the law–no, he’s still in violation of federal law in that regard, and the media is still giving him a gargantuan break on that.

What McCain is doing is returning money donated for the general election period, and he’s returning it with a request to re-donate it to a different fund he’ll use for other purposes. The biggest impact of this news seems to be that McCain is thinking seriously of going the public-finance route for the general election–he seems to think this will be something he can use against Obama, and with the media’s willingness to give McCain a break for his past public-financing legislation, it could even work. Despite the fact that Obama does not take any money from federal lobbyists or PACs, and that the vast majority of his donations are small ones by private persons–the antithesis of campaign finance corruption. Meanwhile, McCain continues to surround himself with swarms of lobbyists, and again, the MSM fails to notice.

McCain has little to lose here, considering that Obama has been out-raising him by something like five-to-one. And Obama could potentially use McCain’s lobbyist swarm and his violation of campaign finance law to blunt McCain’s strategy, while outspending McCain even more than Republicans have outspent Democrats in the past.

I’ve said it before here, and I’ll say it again: movement on a web page is bad. It started with the beginning of HTML, and the dreaded–and thankfully now defunct–“blink” command, which would make text blink on and off continuously. Even the guy who created that is said to have lamented that it was “the worst thing I’ve ever done for the Internet.” The dreaded animated GIF followed close behind, and has powered who knows how many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of annoying, blinking ads. The present-day scourge is the Flash animation, which–while cool and productive if used sparingly and correctly in the right context–is most often used to maddening effect.

Maybe some people can get by reading a web page with stuff flashing an moving all around the periphery–I cannot. It drives me up the fracking wall. And yes, that’s the whole point of an ad, to draw attention to itself–but ads are getting far too intrusive, like those animated ads they have on TV now, where you’re trying to watch a show and characters from some other show walk on to the bottom one-third of the screen and dance around for several seconds. Sorry, but that’s like coming up to someone while they’re reading a book, shaking their shoulders, and then dancing around, saying, “look at me!” You get their attention, but you also piss them off. I understand the necessity of ads, but ads which compete with the content they support are self-defeating–ads should be separate from the content, not taking your attention away from it.

Fortunately, there are measures that one can take. Various browsers have various ad-blocking software; I have settled on using Safari, liking its appearance and overall feature set. For that browser, I use PithHelmet, and have gladly paid the $10 for it (even though just clicking on “I Paid” would stop the nagware element). It does an excellent job of giving the user power over the browsing experience. You choose an overall set of ad-blocking preferences, but you can also change the settings for each individual site. You can choose to switch plug-ins, Java, and/or Javascript on or off for any given site, and there are a dozen or so settings for ad-blocking, by size, source, or type. If there’s a site you visit with any regularity, you can tweak the settings to allow for maximum accessibility and maximum ad-blocking.

An ad blocker can make a difference like night and day. I have been blissfully unaware of how many ad have invaded so many web pages, and was shocked to see how bad things had become when a new version of Safari temporarily disabled my blocker, and the ads suddenly appeared. That demonstrated to me so clearly that a good ad blocker can change a web page strewn with flashing, annoying ads into a nice, simple, quiet place to read your favorite content.

There are drawbacks, of course. For some reason, I can’t get any blocker to stop animated GIFs on my computer, and I can’t figure out why. Fortunately, they are less common today, but the occasional ones on my favorite political blogs (like the EFF button on Daily Kos or the “Listen” mini-ad on Kevin Drum’s blog) annoy me; usually they are small and minimally distracting, but I have a low distraction threshold, and they still bug me. I have to either zoom in on the text (another great use of Apple’s brilliantly-executed zoom feature), move the window so the movement is put out of frame, or suffer through it just long enough so I can scroll past it.

Another drawback is when wanted features and annoying ads use the same resource that your ad blocker can opt the block. Disabling plug-ins will do away with nasty Flash ads, but it will also disable YouTube videos, now a standard component of many blogs. When plug-ins are disabled, there’s no way to even link to the video, so you either have to fish around in the page’s source code and copy it, or temporarily turn the ad blocking off long enough to copy the URL from the YouTube menu. Similarly, when you disable simple image ads, other design-element parts of the page will also disappear. Getting rid of all the ads on Daily Kos, for example, will also get rid of the title banner at the top. Too much of this can make the page look a lot worse, but is still better than having to bear through ads.

But nowt here’s a new development: about a week or two ago, a series of related sites introduced a new version of their code which severely breaks the site’s appearance if you switch off the ads. I’m not sure how they did it, but it’s annoying as hell. LifeHacker, Wonkette, and Gizmondo are among the cross-linking group that use the same base code, and now all look like this:

If you scroll down, you can see the content, against a broken background image; it’s viewable, but only just. The annoyance factor reaches close to that of the ads being blocked. It’s impossible to say whether this was an accidental breakage due to bad coding, or if it was an intentional ploy to tell users, “pay by watching the ads or get the frack out of here.” Sadly, it will probably make me leave those sites for good–maybe what they want, as if I do them no adly goodness, then they make less money.

I have no problem with ads per se, just the annoying ones. If ads had only sat still on the periphery from the start, I probably would never have resorted to an ad blocker. Google does it best–unobtrusive and limited text ads off to the side, and relevant to content the user is looking at–I have even clicked through to some of them, which is a huge thing–I usually, as a matter of principle, never patronize ads on the Internet. But if they’re done right, they’ll work for me. And that’s the magic secret to good advertising: make it palatable, make it so it pleases, not so that it annoys. Advertise right and you can make money. Do it wrong and you drive customers away. The problem with ads is that it’s a lot easier to be an annoying attention-stealer than it is to be a quietly persuasive reminder. And the problem with web sites comes when people get so goddamned greedy that they smother their content with crap so annoying it overrides the enjoyment of the content itself.