Though it's not like the Obama campaign doesn't have some robot allies of their own:
The Day The Earth Stood Still was such a pessimistic movie. Klaatu comes to Earth from a fantastically advanced society which has abandoned violence and war. But not because they have created better means of conflict resolution--because giant robots will kill you if you act violently. It was a strange attempt at an anti-war message, because it seems to fit so well into the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Anyway, how weird is it to have a presidential campaign putting up these kinds of youtube videos? They're usually way too square and cautious to put up videos with robots or using the infamous Epic Bike Fail clip. The Obama campaign is clearly aware of all internet traditions.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
So the McCain campaign is basically running scenes from Birth of a Nation now?
Not really surprised.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Andrew Sullivan have been posting over at the Atlantic about their hopes for a new and improved Republican Party after this election. I have to concur with this, even if it makes the Republican Party more competitive.
I'm sick of our political discourse being centered around bullshit issues--who loves terrorists, and who is a Real American? I don't want to have to constantly defend the right of queer people and women to live their lives free of pointless, bigoted government meddling in their life decisions. I'm tired of a Republican Party which believes it's own spin, and lives in a world where Saddam planned 9-11 and Obama was secretly born in Indonesia or Kenya. I'm tired of dealing with a Republican Party which sees rigorous study and consideration of policy as the 8th deadly sin.
It would be a lot harder to argue against someone making an honest defense of a flat tax than this bizarre Red Scare nonsense. It would be more difficult to defend a candidate against actual arguments than conspiracy theories. But we'd get better policies out of it.
I'm not, however, nearly as optimistic as Coates and Sullivan are about this. This Real America business is failing not because America has changed, but because of the places they are talking about. If the Republicans had stuck to bashing New York and San Francisco and Washington D.C., no one would have noticed. The problem is that they started applying this same language to the newly expanded map. Richmond, Virginia is a hotbed of commie-liberal elitists? Really? No one is buying that.
After the election, assuming McCain loses, the Republican base is not going to enter the period of self-reflection and questioning needed to move towards sanity. They have been taught over the past 8 years that those self-doubt and intellectual consideration are unmanly sins of the left. They are going to go into conspiracy land--it's going to be the Clinton years all over again, but now with the full force of racism and xenophobia behind the madness. We will hear no end of the right's parallel universe Obama, complete with forged birth certificates and secret, anti-American views that he's waiting to deploy until... who knows.
MCCAIN: So is one of the tenets of socialism redistribution of the wealth? Not just socialism — a lot of other liberal and left wing philosophies — redistribution of the wealth? I don't believe in it. I believe in wealth creation by Joe the Plumber.
So... is John McCain endorsing the Labor Theory of Value here? Because that's a lot closer to actual Marxism than redistributing "wealth." (You'd have to redistribute Means of Production to be socialist. Say, by nationalizing the banks.)
Or does he literally believe in a Joe The Plumber-based economy?
Ken Adelman: Superhawk has announced that he's voting for Barack Obama. This is surprising, but not, you know, really all that surprising. He reads the same polling data as the rest of us.
The election isn’t over, but there remain only three discernible, if highly unlikely, paths to a McCain victory. A theoretically mammoth wave of racism, incessantly anticipated by the press, could materialize in voting booths on Nov. 4. Or newly registered young and black voters could fail to show up. Or McCain could at long last make good on his most persistent promise: follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell and, once there, strangle him with his own bare hands on “Hannity & Colmes.”
So the Gates of Hell are behind the Hannity and Colmes set at the Fox News studio? Why does this not surprise me.
As someone who has worked as a canvasser in the past, I can guarantee that this claim that ACORN is attempting to "destroy the fabric of democracy itself" through false registrations is 100% pure bullshit.
Canvassing is a job which involves minimal supervision. Unlike working in an office or a store, employees (the canvassers) are on their own for nearly their entire shift. Groups like ACORN need to make sure that canvassers don't just register voters for 20 minutes then sit down and listen to music for a few hours, so they pay their workers on commission. Register x voters, earn y dollars.
Most of these workers are idealistic kids--usually college students, glad to have a chance to work in politics and earn a few dollars at the same time. Most of them wouldn't dream of filling out a fraudulent form. There will, however, always be people who are a bit less scrupulous. It isn't very hard to fill out a couple extra registration forms to meet a quota, and earn a few more dollars.
Thankfully, the people who try to pull this stunt seem to be almost universally suffering from a chronic lack of creativity. Fake registrations are filled out for Mickey Mouse and Michael Jordan, and the canvassers responsible get fired.
Here's the thing, though--these registrations still need to get turned in. It would be illegal for ACORN (or anyone else collecting registrations) to throw out a completed form. We don't want to have Democratic groups throwing out Republican registration forms, and visa versa.
So ACORN turns in the phony registrations, alerts the registrar to possible fraud, and Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck never show up to vote.
One of the cardinal principles of Cartoon Physics is that a cartoon character may remain suspended in air without any physical support, but only until it looks down. At that point, they get a moment to give a deer-in-the-headlights look to the audience at home, before plummeting to earth to be squashed flat. For the past few years, the US government has been applying this principle to its economic policies: The Wile E. Coyote Theory of Economics.
Our story begins at the turn of the century. The dot.com and telecom bubbles had just burst, and everyone in America was alternately frightened of economic turmoil and relieved that Michael Ian Black would start doing something other than voice-overs for the pets.com dog puppet. In order to ensure a fairly speedy recovery, the Bush Administration (specifically, Alan Greenspan) decided to encourage a move onto a new bubble: housing. Rather than let us fall into a serious recession right then, they would run off the cliff, and just make sure not to look down.
By now most people are pretty familiar with the housing bubble. Everyone began to believe--against all historical precedent--that home prices would appreciate in real terms indefinitely. Lots of people took out really bad loans, expecting to make a profit in the end. Developers began building extremely ill-conceived neighborhoods and towns--the exurbs that David Brooks would champion for their vast lawns and megachurches. TV reality shows began to tell people how they could make money buying and reselling houses (Flip This House!). People bought houses as investments, intending to sell them for far more money in a few years, to fund their retirements.
What was less noticed was what happened to all the mortgages on these houses. This isn't the age of Bailey Building and Loan--the mortgages don't sit in the vault. They get cut into pieces, bundled together, repackaged, and sold on securities markets. This, combined with new bankruptcy rules and a hands-off regulatory attitude from the Bush Administration fed the speculative monster. The big banks and investment firms had leveraged their assets far more than would have previously been allowed. And it all went reasonably well, as long as we didn't look down.
Houses do not appreciate dramatically over time. They generally follow inflation pretty closely, with deviations being very geographically specific. There just weren't enough home buyers out there making enough money to justify this rise in prices. The problem with the housing bubble was not subprime loans being given to irresponsible brown people, as conservatives now claim, but the fact that the premise fueling the growth in housing costs was entirely false. Billions of dollars which were assumed to reside in these houses, and which had been traded and bought by banks and investment funds around the world, were entirely imaginary. Houses weren't worth as much as had been claimed, and the mortgages were much less likely to be paid back than advertised. The ground beneath our feet wasn't really there.
Early this year, banks and investment funds began to realize that they were no longer standing on firm ground. Like Wile E. Coyote, they felt around with their toes for something to stand on and found nothing but air. This began a scramble to minimize their exposure to the billions of imaginary dollars. They started spinning off subsidiaries and hiding their bad assets--what Atrios calls "Big Shitpile." They used accounting tricks to hide their losses from the public and from credit ratings agencies.
But they couldn't hide forever, the fall was inevitable. We all saw what happened next. Billions of dollars which had previously greased the wheels of capitalism--being loaned back and forth between banks, and to firms to invest and meet costs--evaporated. The largest bank failures in American history. Financial institutions needing to be bailed out (or bought out) by the federal government. An ongoing collapse on Wall Street. The credit markets have seized up, and banks have a hard time getting loans from one another. Governments have declared bankruptcy (Iceland) or called out for federal loans (California). This is where we are right now. We're falling, but we haven't hit the ground yet.
So what do we see when we look down? What's waiting for us? Now that the credit markets have become frozen, businesses are going to have a very difficult time getting loans--not just loans to expand and invest, but loans to pay their day to day costs. This is going to cause a wave of bankruptcies and layoffs.
Another problem that would have been noticed by someone other than crazy leftists, had they looked down, is the fall in real wages and consequent rise in household debt. For the past decade or so, real wages have been falling. Consumers have been relying on (mostly) credit card debt in order to make up the gap. With the age of cheap credit coming to an end (along with the age of cheap gas) consumer spending is likely to stagnate, making our fall just that much more painful. As bad as things are right now, they're only going to get worse.
Was finally able to fix my computer's streaming, and caught the whole debate uninterrupted.
John McCain was genuinely crazy angry the whole time. And came of as far more of an extreme right winger than any presidential candidate I can remember. His callous sneer and scare quotes around "women's health" was shocking. So wanting to ban abortion except when the woman's health is endangered is now an extreme pro-choice position? When did that happen? He might as well have stood up on his chair and told all the womb-having Americans watching that he doesn't care about their health or well-being at all.
Obama has gotten a little better at giving narrative descriptions of things, rather than just the stream of consciousness flow of factoids from the first debate. He was pretty clearly being intentionally boring when talking about Ayers and the weird conspiracy theories about ACORN. Having the press spend a couple days talking about his great zinger on Ayers would have been completely Pyrrhic.
Really impressed that Obama brought up the murder of labor activists in Colombia. Not sure he would (or really could) do that much about it. But I've never heard a presidential candidate bring up one of the pet issues we crazy leftists care about before, so points for that.
And then there was Joe The Plumber. What is up with Joe The Plumber.
The level of cognitive dissonance on display in this David Brooks column is pretty impressive. For example:
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Yes. David Brooks wrote that. The same David Brooks who has spent the past 8 years adding a pseudo-sociological sheen to this exact argument. He has twobooks extolling the simple, exurban virtues of Patio Man while mocking the Thai food and concern for social welfare of the coastal Bobos.
He has built his name and his New York Times column around the idea that there are two kinds of people--rich cosmopolitan white people with degrees on the coasts--who are bad--and rich conservative white people with John Deere dealerships in the exurbs--who are good. He has written possibly hundreds of columns with this exact premise. And now he notices that this argument could become part of a conservative anti-intellectualism?
I'm sure we'll hear Brooks in a future column repudiate his past decade of writings romanticizing white flight and deriding "snobs… doctors and lawyers and journalists and media consultants [who] went to fancy colleges."
In the debate, Senator Biden called Dick Cheney "the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history." Now Dick Cheney is genuinely a bad guy, but I think that this does a grave disservice to Vice President Aaron Burr, who not only shot Alexander Hamilton, but actually killed the guy. He had to flee New Jersey in order to avoid being charged with murder. He was later tried for treason for trying to seize control of part of what is now Texas.
Also--like last time, I listened to the debate on NPR. Did Sarah Palin really keep winking at the camera?
