As goes the special election in Michigan’s 19th State Senatorial district, so goes the nation.
I remember talking to voters in this district back in 1980, with Jack Germonde and R. W. Apple, at an old diner that only served coffee, donuts, and burgers. You could tell something was in the air. You could tell the Reagan revolution was coming. People were angry. Regular people, gritty people, blue-collar workers with plastic crucifixes on their dashboards.
I found this story to be interesting (and, for me, local):
U. ROCHESTER—In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.
Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.
The new study, published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of little by little as has been predominantly believed. In addition, such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and coauthor of the study.
It brings up a couple points:
Update. This is good news for conservatives.
Just got an email reminding me of the Obama election movie on HBO tonight.
I’ll probably watch it at some point, but I still find movies like this kind of creepy. Whatever, though. I’m weird.
From the NYT obituary for Claude Lévi-Strauss:
The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective… he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare…
“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”
Of course humans have always had an obsessive interest in the odd ways of That Tribe Across the River, but how many scholars can say they’ve had so much influence on the way “we” discuss “they” today, whether as political bloggers or Media Village Idiots?
I’m actually kind of excited for the series opener of V tonight- I wonder how it will compare to the series from the 80’s. With Morena Baccarin, they have the hotness factor covered, that is for sure.
Also kind of excited about Dragon Age
I guess I missed this particular episode of wingnuttery. I’m a big fan of how after they made asses out of themselves asserting Wright and Ayers and others falsely visited the White House, they then blamed it on the WH for not warning them that different people can have the same name.
Mr. Furious, On the Blue Ridge Parkway, north of Asheville.
Moonbatting Average, Moonrise through the yuccas, Whipple Mountains, CA
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
I’m really loving this special election in NY. I’m sorry that those people are going to be represented by a Bachmann style wingnut, but hey- they voted for him, so they can just deal with it.
But what I find really amusing is that they are taking a win for the Republican in that district as a sign of a conservative resurgence, emboldening them to take their tea party on the road to savage other apostates and those insufficiently loyal to the ideology, when that district hasn’t elected anything BUT Republicans since the Civil War. Again, nothing but Republicans for 70 straight elections, and they are taking the 71st (or whatever it actually is) as a “sign.”
When you think about it, that is funnier than the birthers.
And what makes it extra special is that they will probably succeed in a few safe Republican districts, and primary out a couple of people and replace them with Glen Beck following religious nuts like Hoffman. I wonder if the short-sighted fools at Reason are proud of the monsters they helped create when they were pimping the teabaggers the last six months. I bet Hoffman has really enlightened views on marijuana, pornography, the justice system, and individuals rights. Well done, glibertarians!
I have to admit that the teabagger candidate in NY-23 is polling better than I expected he would. Though, in retrospect, it makes a reasonable amount of sense: the teabag movement appeals largely to the old and the district is old. But I’m wondering if there’s even more to it. It’s my sense that the basic tenets of teabaggerism are:
Conspicuously absent are
In particular, the Dick Armey outfit FreedomWorks seems to be about promoting freedom (I guess from taxes and regulations) here as opposed to freedom (to be a quasi-western American puppet state) abroad. And they don’t seem to talk about Jesus much. Obviously, all kinds of crazy people showed up at the 9/12 festivities, mean of them Hitler-obsessed and heavy into Jesus. But some of that is just that, to paraphrase James Carville, if you drag a Fox News crew through a retirement home, there’s no telling what you’ll find.
I think that a Jesus-reduced, Hitler-reduced conservative message might work reasonably well in some parts of the country, including the rural northeast. It’s probably too anti-union to really work in New York State at large and too anti-immigrant to really work nationally, but if teabagging is traditional wingerism with more Rand and less religion, more Galt and less GWOT, it may end up less fringey that I originally thought.
Bobo’s obsession with chain restaurants took a disturbing turn this morning:
Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad. There’s a laid-off banker who drinks herself into oblivion and wakes up in the beds of unfamiliar men. There’s an African-American securities trader who flies around the country on weekends to meet with couples seeking interracial sex. (He meets one Midwestern couple at a T.G.I. Friday’s.)
Insomnia, Day Three:
Haven’t slept since more than a few hours since getting back from Florida. I keep telling everyone I am “catching up on sleep.” Even my good friends, because I don’t want to burden them. No one told me it would be like this. You are either sick, your pets are sick, or you are stressed, or you have too much to do to think, or you don’t have the time to do what you want to do, or someone is pissed at you and won’t explain why, or your car breaks down, or your dishwasher breaks, or your plants get blight, or something. Always something. Guess I should just consider the fact that my mom, dad, brother, sisters, and pets are healthy. But it just always seems like it is something.
On the other hand, I am watching a lot of old Sopranos episodes. Thank ALLAH I do not have kids. I feel for you people.
The first rule of cabs is when you’re in one, ask your driver about foreign policy. When you’re in five, take an admittedly unscientific poll:
In an admittedly unscientific poll of the last five taxi rides I took with South Asian drivers, Abdullah and Mohamed claimed that the U.S. is ruining Afghanistan and making matters worse in Pakistan with drone strikes that are killing more civilians than terrorists. Najeeb and Ibrahim said it’s a travesty that the U.S. is considering reducing its commitment to Afghanistan after all the pledges to rebuild. They are convinced the Taliban will regain power in double time if the U.S doesn’t change things up soon. Ahmed wholeheartedly endorsed the McChrystal report and claimed he heard about it even before it was leaked.
It’s easy to forget that before the Moonies put him in charge of the Washington Times, John Solomon was writing misleading, Democrat-bashing articles for the Washington Post and the AP:
In his pitch at the Heritage Foundation, Solomon made all of this explicit. The Times, he explained, played an important role in pushing stories that the White House didn’t like. “Before Andrew Breitbart did the ACORN series,” he said, “we did 47 stories about ACORN.” He explained how TheConservatives.com could run the news cycle by arguing that its “Right People” aggregator, which collects tweets and news from a small group of influential conservatives, changed the debate over Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The site was in demo mode, available to Times reporters.
“When we were demoing this, we were running Newt Gingrich as a personality,” explained Solomon. “Everything Newt Gingrich did on the social media space–on Facebook, on Twitter–was aggregating through the technology. We were sitting there–[seasoned Times reporter] Ralph Hallow was sitting alongside of me–and all of a sudden this little Twitter burst comes up from Newt, saying Sotomayor was racist. We jumped on it, we put that out there. That created, as you remember, days and days of a firestorm about whether her personal views about race and gender were biasing her views from the bench.”
Just to be clear: when Solomon was at the AP and Washington Post, he was widely accused of writing ideologically-motivated pieces of dubious authenticity. The Post and AP defended him to the hilt. Now he’s openly bragging about doing exactly what his critics accused him of.
Anyway, all of this proves that the media has a strong liberal bias.
“ACORN and black people stole the NJ gubernatorial election that hasn’t happened yet. Hispanics, also too.”
I really wish I were kidding.
