PPP on 2012 opportunities

Because you never know. Obama still has two and a half years to salvage the mandate he blew.

The state where Obama was most popular in 2009 that he didn't win in 2008, perhaps surprisingly, is South Carolina. One might have expected it to be a state like Missouri, Montana, or Georgia where he just narrowly lost. His approval in SC was 56.1%. I actually thought it was a little curious Obama didn't go after the state more strongly because of a) its large black population, b) what an overwhelming margin it gave him in the primary and c) its whites aren't quite as predominantly conservative as they are in some other southern states. Maybe that'll change in 2012.

Next best for Obama among states where he lost are South Dakota at 55.8%, Georgia at 55.6%, Missouri at 55.5%, North Dakota at 55.3%, and Arizona at 54.7%. It'll be interesting to see what he can do in Az. in 2012 without John McCain on the opposing ticket.

Montana, the second closest state where Obama lost, may be moving away from him. His approval there came in at just 48.1%, mirroring the broader trend of Obama's lagging popularity in the Mountain West region.

A 2012 Obama victory in all but one of these states would attest to an Electoral College landslide. I wonder, however, whether Arizona's changing demographics (30% Hispanic with an extra electoral vote to boot) might make it worth contesting down the road. That said, the meltdown in Democratic Party support in Colorado does not make the Southwestern strategy look very promising right now.

Sloppy

Rumors are that a major Democratic politician has been in an adulterous relationship with Vicky Iseman, whom you will perhaps remember for her (alleged) affair with John McCain. It was about time we had some bipartisanship in American politics.

The banks turn on Democrats

With any luck, that will push the majority party in the House and Senate to crush, then extort.

NOLA.com headline

Mitch Landrieu avoids the runoff

He is now Mayor-elect of New Orleans. a prospect we've been tracking for some time now. Happier still, it wasn't even close.

With 58 percent of the city’s 366 precincts reporting, Mr. Landrieu had 67 percent of the vote. His closest challenger, Troy Henry, a businessman and first-time candidate, had 13 percent.

Though you wouldn't know it from post-Katrina press coverage, departing mayor Nagin was a Republican until he realized he needed some black votes in order to let the GOP control city contracts.

as “the pro-business alternative”. His opponent Police Chief Richard Pennington often called him “Ray Reagan”, for Nagin’s campaign contributions to George W. Bush’s 2000 Presidential campaign and his support of normally GOP positions.

In the end, Nagin rewarded his white supporters, assembling an administration that drew heavily on Republican and Caucasian appointees. He even endorsed Republican Bobby Jindal over Democrat Kathleen Blanco.

Good luck to Landrieu. It's a tough job, but with Nagin out, the city at least has a chance at good governance after eight long, corrupt, incompetent years.  And congratulations, further, on a truly rare achievement: he won two-thirds of the white vote, and two-thirds of the black vote, running against a black candidate. If only that had happened four years ago against an undeserving, reinvented, hypocritical Ray Nagin.

What if David Lynch worked for Disney?

Answer: He did, and the result was a masterpiece, 1999's The Straight Story. Here, however, is an alternate vision, a reminder that soundtracks are as central to the realization of Lynch's vision as meditation and his background in painting.

Lyle Lovett and Ann Richards

What a pair! A song we'll enjoy a lot more after the state's secession:

"That's my other truck"

Intrepid reader G. sends us this awesome cartoon by the Boston Globe's awesome Dan Wasserman.

Islamism, France and Christianistan, USA

Doing something right:

The French government has refused to grant citizenship to a foreign national on the grounds that he forced his wife to wear the full Islamic veil.

The man, whose current nationality was not given, needed citizenship to settle in the country with his French wife.

But Immigration Minister Eric Besson said this was being refused because he was depriving his wife of the liberty to come and go with her face uncovered. [...]

"It became apparent during the regulation investigation and the prior interview that this person was compelling his wife to wear the all-covering veil, depriving her of the freedom to come and go with her face uncovered, and rejected the principles of secularism and equality between men and women," he said.

Many Americans from both political parties would applaud the French decision. Others might ask, "What would these kinds of restrictions mean for the Amish, Mormons, or other religious groups that force women into subservient positions?" To which my only possible reply is, "Indeed!" As we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, democracy in the hands of bigots results in medieval government.

Islamist patriarchy has its American parallel. Indeed, a profound misogyny is the element shared by Islamism, Christianism, Hindu nationalism, and extremist American Republican-Catholic sects like the Legionaries and Opus Dei (which are hardly representative of the Church's majority Latin American and Southern European mainstream).

This section of yesterday's New York Times piece on the appearance of extreme martial arts in evangelical churches is but the latest example.

The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”

The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.

“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.” [...]

Men ages 18 to 34 are absent from churches, some pastors said, because churches have become more amenable to women and children. “We grew up in a church that had pastel pews,” said Tom Skiles, 37, the pastor of Spirit of St. Louis Church in Arnold, Mo. “The men fell asleep.”

In focusing on the toughness of Christ, evangelical leaders are harking back to a similar movement in the early 1900s, historians say, when women began entering the work force. Proponents of this so-called muscular Christianity advocated weight lifting as a way for Christians to express their masculinity.

“This whole generation is raised on the idea that they’re in a culture war for the heart and soul of America,” said Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University.

That, they surely are.

Evangelicals charged with abduction

But, fortunately for them, not child trafficking:

The Americans were transported in two Haitian police vehicles — one labeled “Child Protection Brigade” — from the police station where they have been held since the weekend to Port-au-Prince’s main criminal courthouse. Mr. Coq said beforehand that their immediate release was possible, and the police who transported the detainees took their luggage to the hearing as well in case they were to be freed. [...]

But some of the children had living parents, and some of those parents said that the Baptists had promised simply to educate the youngsters in the Dominican Republic and to allow them to return to Haiti to visit.

Ms. Silsby had made her intentions known to child protection officials, human rights experts and Dominican authorities in Haiti, all of whom warned her that she could be charged with trafficking if she tried to take children out of the country without proper documentation.

" I'm putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban..."

Said, Markos, and for evidence of Republican political attitudes, he commissioned a large sample poll by Research 2000. The results, while hardly surprising to regular readers, are truly remarkable.

1. A plurality of Republicans believe Barack Obama should be impeached.

2. They are against gays in the military, by a margin of 79-7

3. Only 42% of Republicans believe the President was born in the United States. A plurality of Southern Republicans, the particularly fact-challenged that drives the national GOP, are birthers.

4. They believe the President is a socialist, 63-21. They presumably didn't believe George W. Bush was one, even though the prescription drug benefit for seniors was granted under his watch.

5. They believe, overwhelmingly (53-14), that "Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama."

6. Southern Republicans are twice as likely to believe their state should secede from the Union than non-Southern Republicans. This is a rare point of agreement between this blog and Southern Republicans.

7. They oppose rules making it easier to form unions, 68-7.

8. They are against gays in the military, 55-26. Republican youth are only marginally more enlightened (47-31), likely because young people who haven't been turned off by Republican social policies form a fairly insane, if tiny group.

9. They oppose gay marriage 77-7 (again, no hope for young Republicans: 74-11)

10. Even more remarkable: gays should not be allowed to teach in the public schools, 73-8. It's 71-9 among young Republicans.

11: "Should public school students be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world?" Yes, 77-15.

The rest of the poll is just as remarkable.

The base chooses the nominees of their political party. Independents who don't pay much attention to politics and the Beltway media insiders who do, continually float the dream of bipartisanship. But the Republican Party lost touch with reality years ago. Its philosophy of patriarchal, race-based, Southern Christianism supplemented by war and by definition fact-challenged, is now spread more effectively by ministers than politicians.

And this helps explain why there are surprisingly few areas of difference outside of race (and even there only marginally) that distinguish Southerners from the rest of the GOP. How? Why? Because they won. Every member of the Republican base is now formed by white Southern Christianism that gave rise to and funded today's evangelicals. The slaveowners who created the religion would be proud.

The rest of the nation, urgently, needs to know. Good luck with that project.

Thank God

Republicans, fresh off a successful fall spent scaring seniors into believing Democrats would take away their Social Security, go back to their tried and true policy position: actually ending Social Security. You know, "like President Bush tried to do in 2005."

Welcome back, guys! And thanks for not waiting till next January to show your true colors.

The Mormon takeover of California's democracy

Proof of what almost everyone knew already: 1) that the Mormons were the principal fundraisers and organizers of Proposition 8, and 2) that they didn't want anyone to know, since most people hate hate Mormons far more than they hate homosexuals.

Frank Luntz

Outlines the Republican strategy to protect foreign-owned banks from regulation. Always trust the GOP to turn its back on the American people in favor of foreign stockholders.

Idaho Baptists being held for Haiti child trafficking

But they have a defense: the kids were free.

The 33 children on the bus have been temporarily placed in an orphanage in Santo, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince that is run by SOS Children’s Villages, an organization based in Austria. On its Web site Sunday, SOS said at least one of the children, an 8-year-old girl, told workers, “I am not an orphan” and that she believed that her mother had arranged a short vacation for her.

In an earlier posting, SOS said that the children were destined for adoption and that a group associated with the 10 Baptists, New Life Children’s Refuge, advertised adoptions for Americans. But Laura Silsby, 40, who was among those detained, said that New Life Children’s Refuge had paid no money for the children and learned about them from a Haitian pastor, Jean Sanbil of the Sharing Jesus Ministries.

UPDATE: But some Haitian officials were quick to paint the Americans as kidnappers, illustrating how the case was becoming a lightning rod for fears that child traffickers or unscrupulous adoption agencies could try to take advantage of the chaos in Haiti.

The Haitian prime minister told Reuters that “we did not arrest Americans, we arrested kidnappers,” and he said the church members could face serious charges. But the Haitian justice minister and a lawyer for the Americans said there was also a possibility that the group could be returned to the United States.Evangelicals see natural disasters as great recruiting opportunities, and are often met with tremendous success, as in the 1976 Guatemalan earhquake. Child trafficking charges aren't the most auspicious beginning to their conversion effort.

@Idolator's question

"Will the viewers who complained to the FCC about @adamlambert at the AMAs have anything to say about @pink at the #grammys?"

Answer: No. But if she did, I'm sure she'd be defended by traditional, old guard gay media... unlike Adam Lambert, who has the stab wounds in the back to prove it.

Seth Meyers

On Saturday Night Live last night:

On Friday President Obama appeared before House Republicans in a historic televised Q & A and performed so well, afterwards GOP aides said that allowing cameras to roll like that was a mistake. Come on Republicans, are you on such a Scott Brown high you thought you could take down Barack Obama by debating him? You realize debates are why he is President, right? Seriously, all you do is complain how Obama is all talk and then you invite him to a forum that is literally all talk. That's like saying lets see how tough Aquaman is once we get him in the water. I'm not saying you were out classed but the whole thing was like the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the guy charged at Indiana Jones with the sword and he just shot him.

A reminder, courtesy of reader omen, that C-SPAN will rebroadcast the President's Questions at 9:40 Eastern. But if, like me, you'll be watching the only awards show that has less class than the Emmies, here's the President's bravura performance. He ought to do this every week.

Juan Cole

Exxon is more likely to take advantage of the Supreme Court's traitorous ruling than the Saudis, if only because the company's future relies on the U.S. not being energy independent. A few billion in political ads and a couple of hundred thousand more dead American soldiers are worth sustaining the addiction.

It will be interesting to see if the oil and gas corporations directly come after Green candidates in November and shape Congress in their image. I don't think that is the Saudis' style, but it is that of Exxon-Mobil and other energy giants. (The Saudis tend to lobby already-elected high officials behind the scenes rather than doing grassroots work, and in that way are the opposite of the Israel lobbies).

The other thing is that some Saudis have an interest in green energy, including the oil minister. Look up the Empty Quarter on google if you want to guess why. And, Saudi Arabia is moving forward with solar-powered water desalinization plants, which if they can be built and operated economically, might save the arid Middle East from decades of further warfare (Israel-Syria-Jordan, Yemen, Turkey-Iraq, etc. are all looming water wars waiting to happen if there isn't such a breakthrough).

So it is not actually in the Saudis' interest to prevent the USG from throwing research money at solar energy, since they will be able to produce a lot of it and continue to get rich from energy production, and because they need it themselves for effective water plants of the future.

Serena's inspiration?

The Aussies:

Williams, meanwhile, left with a satisfied grin after again defying the critics who had seen her less than brilliant play in the early rounds and who believed she would struggle to get the job done in the final. Yet again she saved her best for last, serving superbly as she moved alongside Billie Jean King on the list of all-time grand slam champions. Williams said it had been inspirational to have King watching from the stands but that the real motivation came from elsewhere. "I think everyone was [cheering] for Justine," she said. "But you know what really helped me out? This one guy was like, 'You can beat her, Justine; she's not that good.'

"I looked at that guy and I was like, 'You don't know me,' " she said, wagging a finger for extra effect. "I think I won all the games after that because that's totally rude."

Mel Gibson's new movie

Didn't take #1 away from Avatar. Per Nikki Finke:

Way more questions surrounded the Warner Bros-distributed Edge Of Darkness starring Mel Gibson in his big screen comeback in front of the camera after an 8-year hiatus. All week Industry chatter focused on whether the director, unquestionably brilliant behind the camera, can regain the star status he enjoyed before that July 2006 drunken anti-semitic rant damaged his public image. But how this new pic performs may relate more to Mel's present day status as an aging action star whose appeal now lies mainly with older males. Produced and financed by GK Films, the Martin Campbell-directed Edge Of Darkness on Friday debuted exactly as Warner Bros expected: the studio this morning told me it received a "b+" CinemaScore and opened to $5.6 million Friday from a wide release of 3,066 theaters for what should be an $1.5M weekend. "We outperformed every vendor who projects via tracking," the WB exec said. But was that lowered expectation good enough? Well, a younger and scandal-less Gibson opened the R-rated crime story Payback to $21M back in 1999. On the other hand, maybe Mel fans who spent Friday night at Shabbos dinner will be first in line tonight for his new pic.

More John Edwards sex tape news

If you didn't believe it existed before, Rielle Hunter's affidavit will change your mind.

Still more from People:

Andrew Young, the ex-aide to embattled two-time former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, says he has an alleged sex tape depicting the former senator and his then-mistress Rielle Hunter – and that the tape is in a safe-deposit box.

"We were offered millions for that stupid tape," he tells PEOPLE. He says he and his wife Cheri found the tape in "a box of trash filled with crinkled paper and tapes" left behind by Hunter. He says they never considered selling it: "We couldn't live with ourselves."

In other news, Dave Matthews says he would have refused to play at a recently widowed President John Edwards' Rose Garden reception following his marriage to Rielle Hunter:

"He didn't ask me," Dave told Access Hollywood.

And if he had, it would have cost him:

"I would make a fair bet that I would have said no to such an offer," Dave smiled.

"Or, I would have charged him some incredible amount of money," Dave added with a chuckle.

Mark Anthony Neal

Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University and one heck of a writer, responsible for that Teddy Pendergrass quote and this one on Richard Pryor:

Remembering Teddy Pendergrass

Yet another singer whose life was destroyed by black homophobia. Luther Vandross, Sylvester and Donnie Hathaway might have been waiting to receive him with their hands outstretched at the pearly gates. Without the vicious community watching, he might have reached out.

Students

Are students:

President Obama visited the Verizon Center today to watch the basketball game between Georgetown and Duke, where the Hoyas are up 46-33 at the half.

POTUS is sitting just feet from the court in a cushioned folding chair, pool reports, just to the right of a line of shirtless students in gray and blue body paint screaming out their support for the home team.

After one of those fans began a r-rated chant following a referee’s call he disapproved of, another student cut him off: "Dude, the President of the United States is right there!"

The President's play-by-play here.

Oprah and Leno

This was the most interesting part of the exchange, more for what it reveals about Oprah than what it does about Jay:

Andrew Young on 20/20 tonight!

No, not the former U.N. ambassador and mayor of Atlanta who once said in support of Hillary Clinton that Bill had "gone with more black women than Barack."

It's the Andrew Young who just wrote his memoirs of the John Edwards campaign. With any luck, Babs will be doing the interview.

UPDATE: Damn, no Barbara Walters. She'll be doing the Jenny Sanford interview next week.

Which states voted Democratic in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008?

I count 17: CA, WA, OR, MN, WI, IL, MI, PA, NY, ME, MA, VT, CT, RI, NJ, DE, MD.

Multiply 17 by 2, and you have 34 senators who come from reliably blue states. The other 26 are in for a re-election fight every time, unless they've achieved sufficient stature to achieve re-election in a state like Robert Byrd's West Virginia, where Bush won by about 15 points.

Then there are other cases like Byron Dorgan and Tom Daschle: moderates who are downright radical relative to states that went for Bush by 20+ points. These senators have stature, but the nature of their states means that when they are faced with a tough political environment and/or a well known opponent, they're in trouble. Bush's landslide, coupled with a tough opponent, the state's sole congressman, killed Daschle's re-election hopes. All the pork he brought to his state as Senate majority leader was forgotten in the onslaught.

Something similar happened recently to Byron Dorgan. He won re-election even in 2004 by a 68-32 margin but with token opposition. This year's poisonous climate for Democratic encouraged incumbent GOP governor John Hoeven to make a run for it, and polling had Dorgan down by 20 points.  He retired from the Senate.

All of which is to say that progressives' anger about Senate Democrats is partly about the Founding Fathers, who gave one-congressman states like North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Alaska as many senators as California, which has 50-60 times their population. There are more solid red states than solid blue states, and each has two senators. The few Democrats from those solidly red states are never safe, as Daschle, Dorgan and so many others tragically attest to.

And that's one reason Democrats find it difficult to find even 50 senators for genuine progressive change in the Senate, much less 60.

Yes, it sucks. If you don't like it, get some petitions together to amend the constitution to ban the Senate or make its representation population-proportionate. Of course, you'll never get the 67 senators required to get that amendment through the Senate. So you'll have to get enough states to assent to that amendment on their own (not that you could, because there are too many small states) and trigger a constitutional convention, something the extreme right has pushed for decades,  to rewrite the entire Constitution. Such an event might or might not ban the Senate. The only thing we can be sure of is that it would ban gay marriage.

A proportional representation, parliamentary system of government with an elected President, perhaps along the French model, is what the left blogosphere is really pushing for.  It's hardly an awful model, but like any constitutional edifice, its corollaries will structure future outcomes, as surely as ours has.

The bottom line is that at least part of what all of us hate about American politics derives not from our horribly corrupt campaign financing regime but the Constitution itself.  Put the two together, and you have 2009. And 1994.  But not 1980. Jimmy Carter screwed up his Presidency all by himself.

"The Proof's In The Poll Results"

Scott Rasmussen has every right to crow about the accuracy of his results. That's particularly true when his results are compared to old media pollsters, who, unlike Democrat-identified PPP and Republican Rasmussen, failed to identify the shift in the Coakley/Brown race. Democrats ought to criticize themselves rather than Rasmussen's partisan but otherwise damn good polling outfit.

The iPad won't just change bookselling

It will change the book itself:

Looking out to the future, I think the odds favor the iPad. As an author myself (of a book about a sixties film producer), the idea of converting my dead tree book to something with short film clips and even musical examples makes me giddy. As a consumer, I'll want to get books that have those kinds of features.

In the early days of technology, new inventions tend to mimic the old. The TV was really a small movie screen, with radio quality audio. In fact, a lot of early TV was really old radio shows repackaged with pictures, i.e. Jack Benny and the Lone Ranger.

The Kindle mimics the book reading experience. It does it well, with a crisp display and an easy-to-use interface. Apple seems to want to take the experience beyond just mimicking a book, to create a new experience. Publishers will have to extend themselves to meet those goals, and so will authors.

In the short term, these gradual changes will be invisible, and I'll happily keep using my Kindle. In the long term, devices like the iPad will win us over and evolve our relationship with our media, just as the iPod did.

It has begun

The biggest pro-Saudi administration ever appointed Scalito and Roberts to the Supreme Court.

In Citizens United, the Republican justices sold America out to every foreign corporation that's willing to pay to play .

Who's the first to pay? Who else? The Saudis. And whose 2010 campaigns will they fund? The Republicans.

Are Democrats smart enough to tie the stench of foreign money to treason and opposition to energy independence, and tar the Republicans with all three? Don't hold your breath.

Will Charlie Crist switch parties?

Wouldn't that be something?