“I’m Voting Republican”
Posted on June 12th, 2008
From PZ Myers’ Pharyngula blog – Bad news from Louisiana on a new bill in Louisiana that allows teachers to supplement science text books with added religious or other material on evolution, global warming, etc. Note that the bill is couched in all sorts of language about free expression and exposure to controversial ideas.
“Remember that crazy teacher with the weird ideas you had back in 8th grade? Now he would be encouraged to bring in bible tracts, anti-abortion screeds, and puff-pieces by right wing editorialists decrying climate change as a communist plot, all in order to balance the teaching of that darned evidence-based biology and earth science stuff.
Note also that this bill, the ‘Louisiana Science Education Act’, was introduced by a Democrat (Ben Nevers, the ignorant pissant) and was approved 94-3.
All I can think is that ‘Louisiana Science’ must be some kind of polite euphemism for ‘bugfuck crazy stupidity’.”
This is from the same state whose governor (and possible Republican VP candidate), Bobby Jindal, claims to have taken part in an exorcism and also cured cancer.
(Via ScienceBlogs : Combined Feed.)
Peggy Noonan in her regular WSJ Declarations column on the pressure for Obama to choose Clinton as VP:
“Choosing Mrs. Clinton would make Mr. Obama look weak. No one would believe he picked her because he respected or liked her. They’d think he was appeasing her. This is not something he can afford! And in any case some people cannot be appeased. Voters would assume she and her people did their voodoo—I have 18 million voters!—and he fell for it. She doesn’t have 18 million voters, she got 18 million votes. It is telling the way she thinks of them, as if they are working-class automatons awaiting her command.
As for reports of their rage, there are always dead-enders, and frantic lovers of this candidate or that. This goes under the larger heading ‘lonely people.’ But there’s reason to think, and some Democratic insiders do think it, that a lot of the supposed pro-Clinton furor is ginned up on Web sites by the Clinton campaign, and even manufactured by the Clinton campaign, to prove Clinton loyalists are real and their demands must be met. In any case, you can see how Mrs. Clinton views her supposed working-class heroes by what she is doing with them now: using them as a bargaining chip to get whatever she wants.
Democrats this year have the winning fever, and Democrats will come out. By November they will be united”
(Via The Wall Street Journal.)
I thought I was perhaps being a touch paranoid back in March in my long post Clinton a Republican (if she can’t win).
Then in April House Democratic Whip James Clyburn also brought up the scary rumors that Clinton was purposely trying to derail Obama to heighten her own future prospects.
For the latest on the paranoid take on the primary drama (which I fully subscribe to, of course), see Frances Moore Lappe’s post at The Huffington Post – Is Clinton’s 2012 Campaign Under Way?:
“We know Hillary Clinton is smart, and we so can assume that for some time she has known, as well as anyone, that it is virtually impossible for her to become the Democratic nominee for President in 2008. So what could explain her continuing to battle, risking her party’s approbation?
We fear there is one explanation that fits too well: that Clinton is actually already fighting the 2012 race. We hope we are wrong. But within this frame, her actions do make perfect sense.
Clinton seems to be doing her best to weaken Obama’s candidacy and therefore the likelihood that he can win against McCain. With that result, she could say, ‘I told you so’ and offer herself as the 2012 savior of the Democratic Party. Her husband’s statement last weekend, that the Democrats were more likely to lose in November if she is not the nominee, fits that pattern.”
A lot of others are beginning to catch the same paranoia…
This video is hilarious:
(Via Living the Scientific Life blog on ScienceBlogs)
Barack Obama has inspired me to do some things that I have never done before now. The first was to give money to a political campaign. Not big money, but to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars. I want him to succeed so I’m helping in that small way that I can. Even bigger for me than giving money, was putting an Obama bumpersticker on my car. I’ve always been of the feeling that the less others know about you the better, so I’ve stayed away from political bumperstickers since I was a teenager. I’m not interested in being judged or prejudged by whoever happens to be behind me. Especially not while living in NC, where the range of people and political beliefs can be quite large in the metropolitan areas, but rather narrower in the country. Not sure whether this is paranoia or just plan cowardice, but whichever, I’m past it now. I want people to know who I support and believe in.
Yard signs have also not been my (or my wife’s) thing in the past. We just weren’t interested in broadcasting our politics to the world or, at the least, to our neighbors. Now we have two Obama signs gracing our yard. Even stranger for me, I couldn’t put these signs out until the yard was properly mowed and trimmed. Not my favorite activity and one I’m likely to put off at any opportunity. This time though, I didn’t want people to think: “look, the guy with the crappy lawn is supporting Obama”. Obama has enough problems with guilt-by-association to also be saddled with my slovenly lawn habits.
Additionally, the bumpersticker is making me drive better. I don’t want to cut anyone off and have them not vote for the man because they think I drive like an asshole. Not that I do, it’s just that I’m extra conscious of it now.
Politically, I consider myself to be an independent but definitely a left-leaning one. Since I could vote, the choices of presidential candidates have been frequently rather poor. Dukakis and Bush in 1988, Clinton, Bush and Perot in 1992, Clinton, Dole and Perot in 1996, Gore and Bush in 2000, Kerry and Bush in 2004. I’ve held my nose and voted for the Democratic candidate before, but I’ve also lodged the protest vote before and voted for Perot. Honestly, most of the time I haven’t seen too much of a difference between the candidates. The Democrats of Bill and Hillary’s group and the Rebuplicans in the mold of Bush Sr. and Dole were pretty similar in many respects. I would’ve thought the same of Gore and Bush Jr, but George quickly disabused me (and the world) that he was in anyway in the same vein. Whole new world of destructiveness under him.
So these last 8 years of our current leader has made me both scared and hopeful for our future. I’m scared of what we have become as a nation. To me it seems at times that we are simultaneously weaker and more arrogant than we were. Much weaker in comparison to what we could be and much more arrogant than what we are, in any way, could justify. Don’t get me wrong, we are a tremendous country, but our belief in our own exceptionalism has continuously let us overlook our flaws and problems. And the problems are many and daunting. Poverty, war and disease. Crumbling education, infrastructure, air travel and health care systems. And the reasons for these are as varied as the problems are daunting. Some caused by greed, some just plain laziness, others by incompetent leadership more concerned with the quick political boost than the long term solution. We really, really need leaders that can see the problems, talk to us honestly about them and maybe help lead us to long term solutions.
As Thomas Friedman put it in the NY Times yesterday:
Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.
I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”
It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”
The past 8 years of arrogance and fearful weakness are what scare me and give me cause for alarm in looking towards my daughter’s future. What will the world be like when she is grown? Will we continue down that path, deluding ourselves that bombs and outrageously rich CEOs make us a better country or will we start trying to change our lives for the better? Will she grow up wanting to be a teacher or a Doctor or a Hilton girl? This is where the hope comes in. I see her and her concern for others and for fairness in all things and I know that on some level it will get better in the near future. Even with McCain is will be better compared to the past 8 years under Bush. For all McCain’s faults, the man does have a brain.
But I see most hope for real change, exciting change that alters the way we think and act as a nation, under Obama. With Obama I see a future for my daughter that is full of perils and full of work but most importantly full of hope and promise. So my signs are up, my bumpersticker on and tomorrow I’ll go cast my vote for what I hope to be a far better future.
From Reuters’ Tales from the Trail at Reuters.com:
“House Democratic Whip James Clyburn, of South Carolina and the highest ranking black in Congress, also said he has heard speculation that Clinton is staying in the race only to try to derail Obama and pave the way for her to make another White House run in 2012.”
Talked about this take on things in a post a few weeks ago, (see Clinton a Republican (if she can’t win)), and this has been echoed by others. The Clintons are only in it for themselves, and prefer that McCain win the election over Obama as it gives them a better shot in 2012. For them, the campaign of 2008 is over, time to start stacking the deck for the next run by screwing Obama now.
From Talking Points Memo Tv, Clinton’s New Math, a new video discussing what would need to happen for Clinton to gain the popular vote lead. The video can also be found on YouTube here.
Video of Bill Clinton in 2004:
“If one candidate’s trying to scare you and the other one’s trying to get you to think, if one candidate’s appealing to your fears and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person that wants you to think and hope…”
(Via Daring Fireball and TPM.)
From David Coleman in the Huffington Post – I Was There: What Obama Really Said About Pennsylvania:
“The response that followed sounded unscripted, in the moment, as if he were really trying to answer a question with intelligent conversation that explained more about what was going on in the Pennsylvania communities than what was germane to his political agenda. I had never heard him or any politician ever give such insightful, analytical responses. The statements were neither didactic nor contrived to convince. They were simply hypotheses (not unlike the kind made by de Tocqueville three centuries ago ) offered by an observer familiar with American communities. And that kind of thoughtfulness was quite unexpected in the middle of a political event. In my view, the way he answered the question was more important than the sociological accuracy or the cause and effect hypotheses contained in the answer. It was a moment of authenticity demonstrating informed intelligence, and the speaker’s desire to have the audience join him in a deeper understanding of American politics.”
Leave it to Clinton and McCain to try and punish someone for being intelligent and thoughtful. For the record here is the text of Obama’s comments at the fundraiser in California that the Clinton and McCain campaigns are trying to make such a stink about:
“You go into 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.”