JUSIPER
Thursday, November 27, 2003
Our allies in less every day
Here in the U.S., most conservatives villify gay relationships of any kind. Across the pond, however, nationwide acceptance of civil unions are now officially on the table - thanks in no small part to a new willingness among conservatives to make the two parties competitive on gay rights.
1:37 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Best thing on TV right now
Angel? 24? Wanda at Large? Joe Schmo? Reruns of The Jeffersons? Good guesses, all, but the answer is James Carville's fantastic fundraising ads for the DNC.
2:44 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Shocking surprise
Arnold is cutting back on food stamps, Medi-Cal, and Healthy Family (which provides health care for poor children).
He is also cutting back on art education for the developmentally disabled and universities. And why not? Arnold managed, after all, to get where he is without either.
12:58 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Op-Ed Columnist: The Uncivil War
Paul Krugman today slices David "Only White Protestants Can Be Leaders" Brooks' arguments against incivility into tiny little shreds.
12:38 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Thursday, November 20, 2003
Major cultural event
This evening the most Reverend Al Green will be the musical guest on the Tonight Show.
9:32 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Monday, November 17, 2003
Talking tough
Is Gov. Vilsack offering advice to Howard Dean or is he telling Democratic voters in his state to choose Dick Gephardt?
2:18 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Saturday, November 15, 2003
You still aren't allowed to visit Cuba
Even though the House and Senate versions of the travel ban lifting measure were identical, it was removed from the appropriations bill in conference"to spare the White House an embarrassment."
3:02 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Thursday, November 13, 2003
John Kerry, liberal moderate
I'm liking John Kerry more and more. He's sounding better in debates, he's first out of the gate with a TV ad using footage of Bush on the aircraft carrier, and - best of all - he's owing more and more to Ted Kennedy. He's got Kennedy to thank for Boston, for stumping in Iowa, and possibly also for Bob Shrum and now Mary Beth Cahill.
Which means that a President Kerry - best known as a moderate Democrat - would owe Kennedy some nice liberal favors in return. Now all Kerry has to do is act like a liberal - and not do anything else that could piss off the party's base, like when he pulled out of the D.C. primary - and he could win the nomination.
9:48 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Kaus pitches a good idea
I don't like Mickey Kaus; in fact, I actively avoid reading his column in Slate. But the title of today's kausfiles caught my eye and I couldn't resist: Bush is Pedro Martinez.
I know, I know, Bush is nowhere near as good as Martinez, and how dare anybody compare the two. But Kaus suggests a great argument for Democrats to use with swing voters for taking the president out of the game. (Did I say swing? Batter batter batter suh-WING!)
9:32 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Tuesday, November 11, 2003
Behind the confederate flag flap
How will John Edwards beat Howard Dean in the South? Slate's William Saletan writes that Edwards is donning the single most important piece of armor for battling Dean in the primaries - and Bush in the general:
Politicians seldom play the race card with impunity anymore. Instead, they play the gay card. If Dean wins the Democratic nomination, conservatives will pound him for legalizing gay civil unions in Vermont. What is Edwards' position on that question? 'The issue of civil unions is one that should be decided by individual states,' Edwards told Tim Russert yesterday.
Actually, believe it or not, this is Howard Dean's position too. Both candies will do their best to make this clear. The question will come down to credibility. Who will socially conservative voters believe? If there was ever any doubt, Edwards has erased it:
Edwards gave the same answer when Russert asked about honoring gay marriages legally performed in Canada. Russert persisted: 'If you were governor of a state, would you be supportive of that?' Edwards replied, 'No, I would not.'
11:31 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Monday, November 10, 2003
Devastating
"The money in our case is just a drop of blood in the bucket."
11:55 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Some'll win, some will lose, some were born to sing the blues
Looks like there'll be loads of pink slips at Wal Mart in a few years.
11:53 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Thursday, November 06, 2003
News Corp Profit Surges on DVD Sales
Turns out Ben Affleck really did make a pact with the devil.
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Revolting sight of the hour
Zell Miller and Pat Robertson's fulsome praise of one another on the 700 Club.
12:13 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wednesday, November 05, 2003
This says it all
A young white man from the South tonight on a Hardball story on regional voting patterns said, "I used to vote for them [Democrats], but not anymore. I don't agree with anything they say."
He closed with the kicker, immortal words that say all that ever needs to be said about the cause of Republican domination in the South: "They aren't for the people. They're for the minority."
8:03 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Tuesday, November 04, 2003
MS Update: Headed to a runoff?
Turnout has been so much heavier than expected today in southern Mississippi that election officials have had to bring additional voting booths into their precincts.
This is good news for Haley Barbour: in south Mississippi, Jackson County voted for George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000, 66% to 31%; Madison County went for Bush, 61% to 35%; and Harrison County went for Bush, 61% to 36%. And unlike areas of northeastern Mississippi, which voted for Bush after supporting Ronnie Musgrove in 1999, these counties went Republican in '99, too.
Also, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger is reporting that "Exit polls show some voting party straight-ticket." This may well be an attempt to tell readers that the paper's exit polls show the vote breaking down along party lines without actually revealing its numbers. Registration in Mississippi is 50% Republican, 45% Democratic.
Of course, there are still wild cards. We have no idea how well Musgrove is mobilizing his voters. Precincts across the state are reporting trouble with poll watchers. And there's still that pesky requirement that says the winner has to gain a majority, not just a plurality.
Right now, I'd say the real question is whether Barbour can hit 50% + 1.
10:01 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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UPDATE: The Louisville Intimidators
Voters head to the polls today in Kentucky to decide the governor's race between Democrat Ben Chandler and Republican Ernie Fletcher. In predominantly black areas of Jefferson County, they will find Republican workers waiting to challenge them.
Under Kentucky law, political parties can put up to two challengers into each precinct in the state. If these challengers "have reason to believe" a voter is lying about his name, unregistered or not a resident of the
district, or is a convicted felon, they can try to have a polling officer block that person's vote.
Though Jefferson County Circuit Judge Thomas Wine derided the GOP for finding more people to challenge votes than to serve as election workers, he has ruled that he cannot stop the Republican effort based on a preemptive fear that it would curtail citizens' right to vote.
As a result, vote challengers are fanning out to 18 precincts in central and western Louisville -- areas that are heavily black. No word yet on how in the world they are trying to detect irregularities -- exactly who looks like they're committing address theft? Or on how challenged voters will respond -- they may have to sign oaths swearing they are voting legally, which will of course slow the process and turn some voters away altogether.
Funny thing is, if you read our earlier post, the Republicans didn't really need to engage in these kind of tactics. But in Mitch McConnell's Kentucky and Karl Rove's GOP, there are three axioms: Squeeze every last dollar you can out of the people and corporations you regulate. Spend those dollars early on ads defining your opponent as corrupt, liberal, unpatriotic and, oh yeah, negative. And question the very legitimacy of that opponent's base voters.
Fletcher, a model student in this campaign, aced the first two rules. Gratuitous though it is, we should probably have seen the third one coming.
10:00 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Kentucky Call
Before I try to get my hands on any exit polls, I am calling the gubernatorial race a pickup for the Republicans, by 8 points.
Kentucky is a place that hasn't changed much in a long time, so it works as a kind of guidestar: shifts in Kentucky politics tell you more about national trends than about changes back home. Its economy has been agricultural forever. Its cities and towns are largely unaffected by either immigration or emigration. And its political culture was not realigned by the critical elections of 1896 (when Americans voted to industrialize) or 1932 (when we voted to reform capitalism). Eastern Kentucky is like West Virginia, with lots of Democratic coal miners and Republican mountaineers. Western Kentucky is like the South, with lots of blue-dog Democrats. Louisville, the largest city, is a lot like Cincinnati – midwestern and essentially Republican. It's been that way for 150 years.
Back when Kentucky native son Alben Barkley was vice-president, and even as late as Sen. Wendell Ford's introduction of Maya Angelou at Bill Clinton's first inaugural, "tobacco," "whiskey" and "coal" weren't partisan words. But as national Democrats turned culturally liberal, the party started losing its voice in the state that's a big producer of all three. Kentucky went for Clinton by 4 points in 1992 and by less than 1 in '96, and then Bush beat Gore 57% to 41% in 2000. Conservatives have realized they can win Republican primaries by organizing, and then win general elections by not being Democrats. As a result, Kentucky's congressional delegation, which for a long time was dominated by automatically-reelected moderate Democrats, has taken a rightward lurch; robo-Rep. Anne Northup epitomizes the new breed.
And then two-term Democratic Gov. Paul Patton turned out to be a corrupt hack who got himself stuck in a sex scandal. (A nursing home operator has charged that Patton gave her facility "favored status" during their two-year affair, then had her investigated when their relationship went bust.) This year's Democratic candidate Ben Chandler isn't just a member of one of the state's most famous families, he's also the attorney general who has spent the better part of his term pursuing the men who put Patton into office. And his efforts led to the indictments of Patton's chief of staff, Skipper Martin, and his labor liaison, Danny Ross, as well as two local Teamsters officials. (Patton pardoned all of them.) But voters just haven't separated Chandler from Patton.
The GOP candidate, Rep. Ernie Fletcher, is a Republican cut from the new cloth: a 50-year-old grandfather who looks 10 years younger; a conservative who won his first congressional primary by four votes; a man with a perfect resume (Air Force pilot, doctor, lay minister). He's also such a dishonest campaigner that local newspapers have started counting pieces of "Fletcher fudge" – one of his radio ads told voters that Chandler "supported Al Gore, a man who wanted to take our guns away." Fletcher, backed by Sen. Mitch "Spending is Speech" McConnell and the Republican Governors Association, has more money than Chandler, and he and his allies have been bombarding the airwaves with misleading ads for months. He hit 50% in polls during the second week in October and his lead stretched to 9 points a couple of weeks
ago.
Chandler is a better campaigner than Fletcher, and given his name and his record, he probably still has some kind of political success ahead of him. But if there's anyplace in the country that people are going to vote for change this year, it's Kentucky, and it looks like that means ending the Democrats' 32-year lock on the statehouse.
10:00 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Sunday, November 02, 2003
Bush-lovers find new face, only to be spurned
Looks like the Greens found yet another possible nominee who doesn't endorse their platform. Jesse Ventura on his MSNBC show this evening:
OK, The Green Party will probably provide a candidate, and I'll go out on the record and tell youthat they approached me. And they asked me if I wanted to be the candidate for President for the Green Party and I declined. It's not necessarily that I didn't want to be a candidate for president, but I felt I didn't quite fit in to the Green Party because to me they are more left than the Democrats, and I'm very much a centrist.
12:14 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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