Oct. 23rd, 2002

sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
Ideas, etc. is an interesting blog which has just gone on hiatus as soon as I started reading it. I can't help but feel responsible, on the same principle that makes me culpable for all the man- and woman-hours wasted by New Yorkers endlessly waiting for busses since I quit smoking (since of course the only thing that ever caused a bus to come when I personally am at the bus stop was my lighting up a cigarette). Now the bus lurks around the corner until the guy smoking the swampweed upwind of me finishes his.

Philosophy & Literature is where the Arts and Letters Daily guys went.

Computer go south? Time not set? You can get it here.

AllWords.com is word junkie crack. In other crossword puzzle news, One Across will enable you like a trooper if you want to cheat erm use reference material to help you solve the Times puzzle, and the Guardian gives you hints here for solving those odd cryptic british puzzles.

Off the Kuff linked to the MoveOn.org post here, and I very much appreciate it.

Woke Up This Morning, Got Myself a Blog is a Sopranos tribute blog. Funny.

Sluggy Freelance is kind of like Zippy with aliens and poop jokes. No, it isn't. Well, maybe. Anyway, it's daily and it's weird and it's funny.

Speaking of weird and funny, Political Predictions - Elections is keeping track of the oracular pronouncements of our pundits and following up with what actually happened.

A cool new map page similar to MapInfo but with a really spiffy interface. Can't vouch for the accuracy.

Some folks at the Universiteit Leiden untwisted an Escher, finished it, twisted it up again and animated the whole thing. Way cool.

The hairdresser guy is back in the race in Montana. Local republican officials were concerned that an empty top spot would cause low turnout for races down the ticket. His campaign website is here. As TBOGG points out, the train wreck aspect of this whole thing only became that much more cringeworthy when Mr. Taylor announced at his press conference that he was going to "go down for a good cause" (as if it weren't squicky enough that every story has to say how long he's been married to his wife and how many kids he has).

Body and Soul links to an interesting new series by the Agonist on replacing the dominant (failed) political paradigm. Also she's Kermit. (I personally appear to be Rowlf. Go figure).

I keep seeing Shou? in other peoples' sidebars and thinking I should read it. This is a beautiful little vignette.

Nitpicker is unhappy with some of our verdant brethren and he'd like to discuss it with you.

P.L.A. rocks like a big rocking thing that rocks in a rocking manner. Here they give a helpful list of ways that the Bush administration has been other than completely accurate in response to Dana Milbanks in the Post. Which article, by the way, follows the first few paragraphs of Bush flat out lying with this lovely analysis:

As Bush leads the nation toward a confrontation with Iraq and his party into battle in midterm elections, his rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy in recent weeks. Statements on subjects ranging from the economy to Iraq suggest that a president who won election underscoring Al Gore's knack for distortions and exaggerations has been guilty of a few himself.

Dana Milbanks, if you recall, is the reporter who announced on TV that he despised Al Gore so much that if Gore ran again, he would have to recuse himself because his journalistic integrity won't allow him to be wildly biased and inaccurate in two consecutive elections.

Dana Milbanks is an asshole and a bad, bad journalist.

Seeing The Forest nicely sums up the grotty feeling I have about being manipulated into caring terribly about a war that the president mowed down the constitution to get, but that he has decided on reflection that he doesn't care about.

Ignatz has been discussing a judge who apparently believes he was hired to sit in judgment of people who violate (what he believes to be) God's Law. Presumably he has direct deposit and hasn't seen the name of his employer printed on his paychecks.

Lisa English at Ruminate This on her thoughts about being included in the freeper Enemies of America list and related issues.

Eric Asimov on New York Restaurant Battles Sometimes this is a very strange place.

Republicans Use Age Issue in Criticism of Lautenberg In related news, Heston Takes Last Lap in the Cause of Guns

SEC Said to Tell Martha Stewart of Evidence for Civil Complaint and about time, too. That forty thousand dollars she got when she sold that stock perfectly legally on receipt of the information that someone with insider information sold theirs illegally has destabilized the market and destroyed peoples' faith in their retirement plans and dammit, they should throw the book at her.

#$%^$&**&)(*^&*^@@$%&

Which mostly clears out about half my history file.

sigh.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
Go read Molly Ivins' latest on the current administration's bad, bad record on women's issues, including my personal favorite, the guy who thinks women with PMS should deal with it by praying (although if he actually gives this advice in person to his gynecological patients I think he should probably be doing a little praying of his own, because you never know when you're going to be needing some assistance from God, if you know what I mean and I think you do).
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
Skippy sends us to Dr. Limerick for a rousing discussion of polling.

Along those lines, I was struck by this story in the Post over the weekend.

Younger voters aren't the only thing that's vanishing from American politics: The gender gap in party affiliation that opened three decades ago -- and has been a fixture of the nation's political landscape ever since -- has narrowed considerably among the current crop of young adults, according to a poll by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.

In recent decades, it has been a fact of political life that women leaned disproportionately to the Democratic Party, men to the GOP. That's no longer true among younger Americans. And the diminishing partisan gender gap has been led by young women, who reject the Democratic Party far more often than their mothers or grandmothers, the survey found.

But young women are not turning into staunch Republicans -- at least not yet. Instead, they have become more likely to describe themselves as independents or supporters of a minor political party.

The poll also found that a gender gap endures on many policy and pocketbook issues. Compared with young men, women younger than 30 are more supportive of gun control and a larger role for religion in public life. And they are more worried about affording health care and whether their family's income will keep pace with inflation.

While such policy differences linger, the poll found that 34 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 37 identified with the Republican Party, compared with 32 percent of younger men. Meanwhile, 30 percent of the younger women and 23 percent of the men said they were Democrats.


Now, this made my whiskers quiver, because while one way of looking at the gender gap is that more women vote Democratic, another is that more men vote Republican. What it seems to me that we have here is a decrease in the Republican faithful while the independent vote swells with voters who oppose the Republican stance on hotbutton issues.

I had to wait a few days for the Kaiser Foundation to release the actual numbers, details and methodology of the survey (which are in PDF format here) but now they're out and it seems to me that what's really interesting about this (other than the fact that the margin of error for the youngest voters is so high that the entire Post story could pretty much disappear in it) is that based on what they say are their concerns, the youngest voters seem to presume that they will never become older voters. Well, they'll learn.

Things you would have thought they'd find interesting enough to put in their story:

Do you think things in this country are generally going in the right direction or do you feel things have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track?

Right Direction - 38
Wrong Track - 53
Don’t know/Refused - 10

If the election were being held today, only 35% of people 50-64 and 39% of voters 65+ would vote for a Republican for the House. Those are, of course, the group with the best record of getting out and voting.

Do you think gays and lesbians should have the legal right to get married, or do you think they should not be able to get married legally?

Should have the right to get married:
18-29 - 55%
30-49 - 45%
50-64 - 37%
65+ - 20%

Do you favor or oppose stricter gun control laws in this country?

Favor
18-29 - 67%
30-49 - 57%
50-64 - 55%
65+ - 53%

Do you support or oppose affirmative action programs that give preferences to blacks and other minorities?

Support
18-29 - 49 %
30-49 - 38 %
50-64 - 31 %
65+ - 30 %

and then there's this little gem:



Looks like the voters of the future aren't too happy with the Republican platform, and the voters of the present are downright pissed off. If I were Karl Rove, I would take very little comfort from this survey.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
This on the illusions people have about Republican fiscal darwinism and their place in it, is just brilliant.

I think its author is taking a short break, though.

hee.

Oct. 23rd, 2002 12:15 pm
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
on Taylor's campaign schedule now that he's reentered the Montana race

...

10/31/02 - Photo-op with trick-or-treaters, photo runs in local paper of Taylor with a group of voters dressed as the Seven Dwarves, Taylor hugging Dopey. Puts out a preemptive press release saying that he's not gay, despite nobody thinking that. In a comedic tour-de-force reminiscent of Kevin Kline in In & Out, he whirls around his campaign headquarters trying to convince a hundred people who don't think he's gay that he's not gay, eventually conks himself on the head and is hospitalized, withdraws from the race for four more days.

...
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
Governor Glendening is considering putting the National Guard to work protecting polling places from the sniper if he hasn't been caught yet.

The sniper has been a disaster for Ehrlich so far, with a generally moderate state being reminded on a very visceral level every day of gun control issues. I can't think that having to walk past armed soldiers on duty at the polls is going to have a good effect on Maryland voters' point of purchase decisions in the polling booths.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
TBogg tracked down the "non-political" group that's bigfooting their way into the Wellstone-Coleman election with $1m in last-minute media buys.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
Thoughts from the perspective of a lawyer who's defended people in the spot Noelle Bush is in.

A really staggering statistic, too.

Wow.

Oct. 23rd, 2002 08:13 pm
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
That's it. Just wow.

Get tissues first.
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