An irrational electorate. A man bites dog story. No, let’s not use that unfortunate turn of phrase. A fluke then. Somehow the AP had to characterize President Obama’s surprisingly close victory over Keith Judd, a prison inmate, in a Democratic primary. This was their lead. “Just how unpopular is President Barack Obama in some parts of the country? Enough that a man in prison in Texas got 4 out of 10 votes in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary.” According to another outlet, the reason for the close result was voter ignorance.
Even in the more liberal Eastern Panhandle, some voters subscribe to widely discredited rumors about the President. “I know he’s a Muslim,” said voter Charlie Teal here in Martinsburg. “The Islamic religion is not just anti-Christ, it’s anti-freedom for the American people…. He’s a dictator.” The President is a Christian.
Well the labels are coming unstuck and mixed up and the press is having a hard time getting them on again. Take Richard Lugar, whose 36 years in the Senate ended when Republican primary voters chose a relative unknown. His loss is being described as a defeat for ‘centrism’ and ‘GOP nonpartisanship’. Lugar, it now turns out, was the standard-bearer for nonpartisanship.
“Another domino topples. With Sen. Richard Lugar’s defeat in the Indiana Republican primary, it is now possible to count on one hand the number of centrist GOP senators with a track record of working with Democrats on legislation.” For those old enough to remember it, the “domino theory” was a phrase coined by President Dwight Eisenhower to describe cascading failure.
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Polipundit thinks three pieces of news should alert the White House to the danger of political wipeout in November.
- North Carolina added marriage protection to its constitution by a margin of 61-39!
- Richard Mourdock defeated Obama’s favorite senator – the longest-serving Republican senator – by 61-39!
- Scott Walker got more votes than his two Democrat opponents combined, even though he was “running” unopposed in the Republican primary!
It is certainly bad news for the Democrats. After all, the Wall Street Journal notes Scott Walker obtained more votes than his Democratic primary opponents combined, giving lie to Huffington Post‘s interpretation that Tom Barrett has somehow stormed back for rematch. The more obvious interpretation is that Big Labor, having decided to demonstrate its overwhelming power by the shores of Madison’s Lake Mendota, only succeeded in demonstrating how far it had fallen.
But the trend is not narrowly partisan. There is an anti-establishment wind blowing through the world which has swept incumbents away in Europe and elsewhere. James Carville’s cries: Democrats “wake up!”
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Employees at the New York Times describe their horror, in their video after the Read More, at discovering that the pensions they had been counting on might not — will probably not — be there on retirement. Glenn Reynolds, in a roundup of links, notes that the Washington Post’s management is in shock at the unexpected decline in their circulation and revenue. They have lost $22.6 million in just the past quarter. What has disturbed them most is the failure of their attempts to leverage social media to boost readership. John Herman of Buzzfeed says the Guardian’s social media projects are in similar decline.
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Welcome to the Don Quijote airport, where only the sound of a distant train breaks the silence in field designed for jumbo airliners. No, really.
The doors to the new air terminal are locked shut, the parking lot is nearly empty and the runway, built for Airbus A380 super-jumbos, has no traffic. The only breach in the silence over the nearby scrubland these days is the sudden whoosh of a train on the high-speed line to Segovia …
It was conceived as Madrid-South, a second airport 100 miles south of capital, though only 50 minutes by train and across the tracks from where city fathers hoped to build the “Kingdom of Don Quijote,” an entertainment park to include Spain’s biggest casino. Unemployment in this town of 60,000 would have disappeared, and Ciudad Real would be on the map. That’s not to be, for the airport closed down on April 13. At its closing, only a handful of flights used the facility each week.
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Opinion is divided over whether France, Greece or Spain will take center stage next in the European saga. Some say France. With the Merkozy act split, the Telegraph writes that a replacement must be found for the absent French partner at German insistence. “France election: Germany rules out reworking EU’s ‘fiskalpakt’ despite calls to do so by Francois Hollande, France’s president-elect.”
But there may be no drama there. The conventional wisdom is that Hollande will assume any position necessary to preserve Europe, which is almost as important to the French Socialist party as socialism itself. He will dance in pinched shoes if need be, but the same cannot be said of the Greeks. The new Greek government looks set to renege on the terms of its bailout.
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European readers were amused and not a little frightened to read of pastoralism’s return to Italy. “As Italy’s unemployment rate topped 10pc this week, it emerged that young people are flocking to become shepherds.” With dreams of a white collar career rapidly diminishing, a life on the land now seems preferable to “starving in an Armani suit”, as one commenter put it.
Election results in Greece, France and Germany have made it clear that the European electorate is unwilling to continue paying off their rising debt by raising taxes and tightening their belts. “With Europe’s economies plunging further into recession and as unemployment in the eurozone breaks record levels, voters demands for a new approach had finally become to great to ignore.”
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Tanorexia is the term to used describe the latest form of “Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). BDD is a conditon “wherein the affected person is concerned with body image, manifested as excessive concern about and preoccupation with a perceived defect of their physical features.” Some people think they are too thin and cure it with anorexia. Some people think they are too pale and camp out in the tanning salon for tanorexia.
Nobody’s perfect. As Ceferino Chang once told Philip Marlowe in the novel Playback, “I’m part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part Filipino, and part ni**er. You’d hate to be me.” But dysmorphia ain’t what it used to be in the bad old racist days. Today some people simply hate to be themselves, whatever they are. We live in an age of equal opportunity dysmorphia.
People with BDD say that they wish that they could change or improve some aspect of their physical appearance even though they may generally be of normal or even highly attractive appearance. Body dysmorphic disorder causes sufferers to believe that they are so unspeakably hideous that they are unable to interact with others or function normally for fear of ridicule and humiliation about their appearance. This can cause those with this disorder to begin to seclude themselves or have trouble in social situations.
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There is already abundant evidence that liberals are smarter than conservatives. Bill Moyers noted that “many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths.” He was of course referring to the neanderthal conservatives.
No wonder many people still believe Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, as his birth certificate shows; or that he is a Muslim, when in fact he is a Christian; or that he is a socialist when day by day he shows an eager solicitude for corporate capitalism. Partisans in particular – and the audiences for Murdoch’s Fox News and talk radio – are particularly susceptible to such scurrilous disinformation. In a Harris survey last spring, 67 percent of Republicans said Obama is a socialist; 57 percent believed him to be a Muslim; 45 percent refused to believe he was born in America; and 24 percent said he “may be the antichrist.”
But maybe they can’t help it. One possible why conservatives are stupid is they are born that way. Science Daily has an article which concludes that “atheists and liberals” are just plain smarter. Politics is a function of IQ. “Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as ‘very liberal’ have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as ‘very conservative’ have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.”
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David Wiegel at Slate reacted to news that Barack Obama’s girlfriend in the book Dreams From My Father was a composite figure by saying it has always been known that the autobiography was fictionalized by ‘compression’. The problem arose as a result of a new book by David Maraniss, which draws upon conversations with the President. “Obama has now told biographer David Maraniss that the ‘New York girlfriend’ was actually a composite character, based off of multiple girlfriends he had both in New York City and in Chicago.” Wiegel says that right wing hacks have fallen on the tidbit with glee.
Obama lied! Except — wait, hang on, anyone who reads Dreams From My Father starts with this disclaimer.
For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology. With the exception of my family and a handful of public figures, the names of most characters have been changed for the sake of their privacy.
This has been known for years. Obama’s memoir has stymied reporters because characters who might have some insights appear in composite form. The most famous of them, up to now, was a guy named “Ray,” who gets all of Dreams’s “angry black dude” lines. Is it kosher for a future president to write like this and then be cagey about who was who? Interesting discussion! But in 2012, you can’t “admit” something you told book-buyers in 1995.
Speaking of compression, there are two kinds: lossless compression and lossy compression. In lossless compression the facts are unchanged. They are only expressed more succinctly. In lossy compression, however, something is left out permanently.
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