Archive for October, 2010

CHARLIE CRIST WREAKS POLITICAL MAYHEM: “Since that casual May 2009 e-mail announcing your candidacy for U.S. Senate, you’ve ripped apart the Florida GOP, and now it’s dividing Florida Democrats. You’ve gone from national superstar and future presidential contender to someone banished from your lifelong party and fighting for political survival. Not to mention the trickle-down effect: Republican fixture Bill McCollum, poised to breeze into a second term as attorney general, is now through in politics; probably so is your lieutenant governor, Jeff Kottkamp; Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, the state Democratic Party’s great hope, skipped reelection and is locked in an ugly, neck-and-neck race for governor against a controversial businessman no one had heard of nine months ago.”

ELECTION REPORTING FROM Vidalia, Georgia.

THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT GOES TO ALASKA: “For a good preview of how politics, rather than law, may drive decisions in the Obama Justice Department next year when redistricting gets underway, go north, young man, and cast your eye on the Senate race in Alaska. The latest shenanigans by Alaskan election officials and the Voting Section of Justice’s Civil Rights Division show a dangerous willingness to bend regulations in furtherance of political objectives.”

PROFESSOR JACOBSON: David Brock of Media Matters Issues A Challenge, And I Challenge Back.

UPDATE: Plot still thickening in Alaska.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “There’s nothing better than being lectured by liars on what proper journalism is.”

“Of course it’s JournoList – it’s Greg Sargent,” Breitbart said in a phone interview. “Then you see Ben Smith say ‘a snippet,’ acting as if the audio, the information, isn’t telling enough. Then, you see Media Matters – the same players – the same ones that get invited to the White House, the same ones that get on special conference calls, the same ones that get the shout-outs at the press conferences, who get their presidential 15 minutes of fame, the same bloggers who have access to key people within the administration. They’re all working in cahoots with each other, it’s predictable. Every single damaging bit of revelation.”

Ouch.

PROF. ALTHOUSE IS CORRECTING THE “EITHER SHAMELESS OR IGNORANT” BRIAN BEUTLER. It’s amusing how often we see faux-intellectual arrogance coupled with cluelessness these days.

Plus, from the comments: “Man, if I were Sarah Palin, I’d throw an obscure fact or quote into every speech, tweet, post, or sneeze I made, just to watch these fools twitch.”

MISS ME YET?

Related: Thin crowd. “President Obama wrapped up a weekend of last-minute campaigning in Ohio on Sunday, addressing Democrats in an indoor arena that, in a sign of the ‘enthusiasm gap’ that the president is working so hard to close, was little more than half full.”

UPDATE: President Clinton Draws Dozens Upon Dozens in Ohio.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “Miss me yet? I miss them both.” Heck, even Jimmy Carter is looking better . . . .

Plus, Bummer: Kid Dresses Up as Obama Joker For White House Halloween Party.

CHANGE, AND MEDIA FEAR: “Isn’t it amazing how these same people that were thrilled by the idea of America electing as president a junior senator from Illinois with little qualification for the most important office in the land are now scared to death about who may be going to Congress next January?”

UPDATE: Charlie Martin emails:

I’m kind of curious whether NPR is going to reprimand Totenberg now. This was after Juan Williams was fired, so there’s certainly no excuse that she either didn’t know the policy, or that her past transgressions were before a change in policy.

Okay, I admit it: that was rhetorical. I don’t *really* wonder.

She’s popular with the tote-bag crowd; Williams wasn’t, because he challenged their idea of what a black man could say in public.

SNAKEBIT: Coral Snake Antivenom Crisis Gets a One-Year Extension. “The world’s stock of coral snake antivenom, set to expire this weekend, gets a last-minute one-year extension from the FDA. But is there enough antivenom to last that long?”

CAN DARPA FINALLY BRING US the flying car? I have to say, I don’t really want an aerodynamics-based flying car. I’d take that, but I really want Jetsons-style antigravity.

UPDATE: Yes, I’m going the Full Jetson.

IN RUSSIA, DECAY AND DECLINE: “The current government has made progress in fixing the economy and reducing the atmosphere of lawlessness. But corruption is still rampant, and the newly centralized government is seen as a return to autocratic rule of the past. The problem with autocratic strongmen is that they tend to stay in power long past the point where they are effective. The czars and communists both suffered from this, and it is feared that new ‘democratic dictatorship’ will do the same.”

JOEL KOTKIN ON OBAMA’S MISTAKE: Suburban Nation, but Urban Political Strategy.

The connection between suburbs and political victory should have been clear by now. Middle- and working-class suburbanites keyed the surprising election win of Republican Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts in January. Suburban voters were also crucial to the 2009 Republican gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey, two key swing states.

Nationally, suburban approval for the Democrats has dropped to 39 percent this year, from 48 percent two years ago. Disapproval for President Barack Obama is also high — nearly 48 percent of suburbanites disapprove, compared to only 35 percent of urbanites. Even Obama’s strong support among minority suburbanites, a fast-growing group, has declined substantially.

Many suburban voters, notes Lawrence Levy, executive director of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, appear to be undergoing “buyer’s remorse” for backing Obama and the Democrats last time around .

As they should:

Many of the administration’s most high-profile initiatives have tended to reflect the views of urban interests – roughly 20 percent of the population – rather than suburban ones.

When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a “president from another planet.” After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Scott Littler writes:

“Bomb the Suburbs” was popular in democratic socialist circles in the early ’90’s. A fellow El Salvador “solidarity” activist gave me a copy back in that ’93-’95 era. It’s probably still in my basement collection of America-hating books: “Fidel & Religion”, “A People’s History…”, etc.

That America elected a grown man with the politics that I had as a 18-25-year old stoner, America-hating, Fidel-admiring, “democratic” socialist was more than a little surprising to me. Positively freaky-deaky.

I see now on Wikipedia that it was Chicago-oriented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_the_Suburbs. Imagine that. The author seems to have an Ayer-esque-lite biography – son of privilege, hater of the normal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Upski_Wimsatt

Yeah, imagine. But Bomb The Suburbs was really a rap/hip-hop book (though anti-suburban), and it should be noted that the author has since written Please Don’t Bomb The Suburbs.