The Manchurian Candidate

I saw the remake of this movie several weeks ago and promised to several people that I'd eventually write about it here. Overall, I found the movie quite disturbing - I don't remember the original one being disturbing at all, but then again I don't remember very much from the original one. (For instance, I don't remember if an assassination takes place, didn't remember that the special card was the queen of diamonds until I saw some posters for it, and generally didn't remember much other than the premise of brainwashing.) Anyway, the new one has much more psychologically twisted characters, and seems to me a much more biting commentary on contemporary political figures. (But again, I'm not so familiar with the 1950's political scene.)

Much of what I'll discuss has some spoilers for the remake, so be warned if you want to read it. (At this point I assume that anyone who hasn't already seen it doesn't mind too much having some points given away - I'll avoid mentioning the ending and anything else that isn't suggested throughout.)

"Guest" Blogging

While Bob and I were largely gone over the past few weeks, one of our most loyal commentors, Kilroy, has posted some very interesting comments. Here's one on political futures markets and their supposed reliability as information sources, and here's one on the sort of "fair and balanced" coverage the news media as a whole tend to give us.

I'm glad that we can continue to be a site for interesting (often political) discussions, even when Bob and I are away.

Swing State Report: Maine

I'm returning now that I'm back from a summer in Maine teaching at the Canada/USA Mathcamp, followed by a week of cleanup and visiting friends in Boston, New York, and New Jersey, in particular for a high school friend's wedding.

Since I was in Maine for six weeks, and it's been on the map of swing states in this election, I might as well give my impression of the political scene there. The first thing I noticed was how much of a military state it seems to be. That is, everyone seems to have "Support our Troops" and various yellow or red-white-and-blue ribbons on their cars. The Bangor airport is full of memorials to military people and various wars and medals and such. (I believe this is in part because it's the last fueling stop for American military planes headed eastwards.)

In addition, it's full of small towns. I thought Waterville (where the camp was located, at Colby college) was a fairly obscure town, but when we went in to Augusta (the capital) to rent some supplies and go to a larger movie theater, it was clear that it was only slightly bigger. There were only two airports in the state large enough to expect our campers to fly to, in Portland and Bangor. Portland's airport was much bigger, but it still only had four gates, and about four flights a day to Dulles, LaGuardia, and O'Hare, along with a few flights to Albany, and a whole lot to Boston (which is a 17 minute flight). Checking CityData.com, I see that Waterville has 15,000 people, Augusta has 18,000, Bangor has 30,000, and Portland is a teeming metropolis at 60,000. So the focus on military and on lots of small towns suggests that Maine could be fairly conservative.

However, it also has a whole lot of colleges. On the drive between Waterville and the Portland airport (about an hour and a half), we passed Colby, Bowdoin, UM-Augusta, and a sign pointing to at least five colleges in Portland itself. And if you go farther northeast, you reach Bates and probably a few more colleges in Bangor. While these colleges are fairly small, several of them seem to dominate their towns. And this seems to show in the fact that Waterville has two Thai restaurants! If all these college kids register in Maine this year instead of their home states (a lot of them are probably from Maine, but a lot are probably also from other New England states that aren't such swing states) that could make the vote a lot more liberal.

All these points so far are fairly ambiguous - military people aren't as clearly Republican this time around as always (both because of how Bush has been straining the military and because of Kerry's Vietnam record), small towns don't guarantee conservatism (see Vermont, whose largest town is Burlington, with 38,000 people), and colleges don't necessarily make much of a difference in the outcome of elections. But the point that seemed most indicative to me was that every time I went on the highway, I noticed at least one car with a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker (more on the Colby campus itself, but I always noticed some on the highway), and I think in the entire six weeks I was there, I only noticed a single car with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker. This seems to reflect the fact that Kerry has been up by about 4 points in just about every poll I've seen, so Maine probably isn't as much of a swing state as they make it out to be.