You remember when I said that Zogby was going to come out with a poll showing the race tied so that someone could say the race was closing? Well, shock of shocks, they’re going to have McCain up one tomorrow.
This, of course, means that after weeks upon weeks of every poll showing Obama with a consistent lead in a range of about three to fourteen points, and with absolutely nothing happening on Thursday and Friday to in any way change the shape, direction or perception of this race, three days before voting starts everything that hasn’t been working for the past several weeks suddenly takes hold and FUNDAMENTALLY ALTERS THE CONTOURS OF THIS RACE AND THE WORLD OMG.
If Zogby didn’t exist, a conservative blogger would have to manufacture a story saying the liberal media was holding fake-him hostage.
I was stoked to read Andrew O’Hehir’s list of the universally agreed upon 10 scariest horror movies ever, and while I’m down with nine of the ten, I have to register my dissent on “The Exorcist”. In fact, every time I think of “The Exorcist”, I think of one family gathering where my sister was making fun of one of the many demonic Reganisms, and other relatives expressed their belief that the movie was fucking scary. My sister laughed and said, “I don’t know. I laugh at it. I think it’s hilarious.” I agreed that it was hard to do anything but laugh at how stupid it is. “Comedy classic,” my sister concluded.
It’s not that I have something against horror movies. In fact, I find them fascinating, as they’re, more often than not, an interesting way for the culture to grapple with its psychosexual issues. But because of this, most good horror films are good because they exploit ambiguous feelings and half-baked beliefs lurking in the public. Slasher flicks are roundly castigated for blatant misogyny, and usually that’s fair, but a good slasher flick ("Halloween", “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and even “Nightmare on Elm Street") isn’t content with showing an immature male audience one satisfying image after another of young woman after another being killed for being sexy and sexually active (but not with you).* These movies are more ambiguous, and the hostility towards young women isn’t set in stone. You are put in the place of the killer and are expected to feel repulsed by his violence and his misogyny, and you are in the room with the victims, who come across as normal human beings whose deaths are tragic and not just set dressing.
This week, Barack Obama ran a half hour ad right before Game 5, Part II of the World Series of American Heterosexual Baseball. The going whisper campaign was that Obama pushed back the start of the third of a game to air his presumptuous ad, and that Real Americans would be bitterly, clingily angry at his great affront to a playoff series none of them were watching.
In 2000 and 2004, this would have been the defining narrative of the last two weeks, not McCain’s William the Hung or a tape concerning an obscure Columbia professor’s 2003 dinner. Obama not understanding the real priorities of American, of having the utter audacity and presumptuousness to think that a glorified infomercial was enough to push the American pastime out of the way.
Yet, somehow, it wasn’t. It bubbled up once or twice, and went nowhere. Part of this was probably public disinterest in the game, part of this was probably the fact that the McCain campaign could run against a child molester and make their campaign message about whether or not the guy actually bought the weed he smoked in eleventh grade.
But another part of this is the fact that Obama is simply that good of a campaigner. He nullified the “regular guy” meme months ago, shook up the same frame that’s worked since Nixon was running, and did it while running as a black guy with a funny name. It’s why I don’t worry about the race closing, or even about close-race shenaningans on Tuesday. I just feel like he’s got this covered...and it’s why I’m more confident than ever that he’ll be a good, possibly great president.
It also helps that John McCain is wandering around making jokes about 1930s Russia and bear DNA, the crushing issues of the day. Never let that man’s incomptence be understated.
There’s a wonderful blog, KansasPrairie.net, where Peg Britton blogs about many topics, but I was drawn to her blogging about Barack Obama’s maternal family (the white relatives). There is a great post that features a photo of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham and her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham. Some background in the post.
“They secretly married on the spring weekend of the annual junior-senior banquet in 1940, Madelyn’s senior year, several weeks before graduation, according to friends. Continuing to live with her parents, Madelyn didn’t tell them about her marriage until she got her diploma in June. The news was not a big hit at the Payne family home, but parental objections didn’t matter.”
“When World War II came, Stanley enlisted in the Army. Madelyn became a Rosie-the-Riveter at Boeing Co.’s B-29 production plant in Wichita. And Stanley Ann Dunham arrived in late November 1942.”
“The Dunhams were full-time working parents, renters and strugglers in pursuit of the next opportunity. After the war, Madelyn worked in restaurants while Stanley managed a furniture store on Main Street in El Dorado.”
“Mack Gilkeson, a retired engineering professor who grew up in El Dorado and knew both Madelyn and Stanley, has watched their now-famous grandson too. “If I were to squint my eyes and look at Barack,” he said, “I’d almost see his grandparents.”
Barack Obama favors his grandfather to a great degree. I wonder what the race-obsessed people who are scared of electing a black president think about this photo (or this one), his family, who loved and cared for him. It chips away the ridiculous one-drop rule of assigning a person to a racial category based on appearance. It makes people discuss the complexity of culture, race and heritage.
For all of the desperate, color-aroused people denigrating Obama with ridiculous charges - fearing that he will enslave white people, or use the power of the presidency to “redistribute wealth” (read: take from the wealthy and give to those poor, lazy black people)—it’s easier to only see his blackness (or, rather, what they imagine it to represent), choosing to ignore that his bloodline and upbringing is no less American than Joe the Plumber’s. They don’t want to face that. It makes some people still queasy about miscegenation squirm. They don’t want to see themselves in Barack Obama; it’s easier to dismiss the Other as alien or suspect.
Quite frankly, there’s nothing we can do about attitudes that are irrational, even unhinged because of internalized racism and the desire to feel superior to groups historically targeted for discrimination.
Other Barack Obama posts at KansasPrairie.net are here.
I’m never again going to doubt the wisdom of this campaign. At every step, when I feared that they were going off the rails, doing something that would imperil their chances at winning, it always turns out to be right. From the primaries to the general, when they make a move, they make it worse.
Of course, I’m talking about the McCain/Palin campaign and their propensity for throwing people out of their rallies for no particular reason.
Perhaps most prominent was their refusal to let the president of Penn State University into an on-campus rally, although to be fair, the 7,000-person rally was also fully screened so that only die-hard supporters would be allowed in. This makes perfect sense, as the surest way to swing the undecided and slightly Obama-leaning supporters that you need to your side is to make sure that they’re refused access to you.
A McCain-Palin campaign official snubbed the president of Penn State University who inquired about attending a campus speech Tuesday by Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, university officials told ABCNews.com.
“He’s a big Democrat. Why would he want to meet Palin?” campaign aide Russ Bermel allegedly asked a school employee who was hoping to make arrangements for president Graham B. Spanier to meet Palin, according to Spanier’s office.
Wasn’t part of the rationale of adding Palin to the ticket to attract die-hard Democrats who were former Clinton supporters, particularly in states like Pennsylvania? Oh, I forgot, no rationale in their campaign can last longer than three days, because then it starts to get old and stupid.
This is small potatoes compared to the real genius exhibited at their rallies - throwing out any and all young people because they look shady. This includes their own supporters, because...why wouldn’t it?
Lara Elborno, a student at the University of Iowa, said she was approached by a police officer and a McCain staffer and was told she had to leave or she would be arrested for trespassing.
“It was a very confusing, very frustrating situation,” Elborno said. “I said that I had a right to be there, I wasn’t doing anything disruptive — I was sitting, waiting for the rally to start.”
[...]
Elborno said even McCain supporters were among those being asked to leave.
“I saw a couple that had been escorted out and they were confused as well, and the girl was crying, so I said ‘Why are you crying? and she said ‘I already voted for McCain, I’m a Republican, and they said we had to leave because we didn’t look right,’” Elborno said. “They were handpicking these people and they had nothing to go off of, besides the way the people looked.”
I really can’t see any problem whatsoever with threatening the arrest of people at your events because they don’t fit the correct profile of your supporters. People love that shit.
Via Calitics, another case of over-the-edge, morally bankrupt fundie hysteria over Prop 8. Brad Dacus, a spokesperson for Yes on 8, is also the head of the bible-beating Pacific Justice Institute. Here is what he said at an official pro-Prop 8 rally:
“There was another time in history when people, when the bell tolled. And the question was whether or not they were going to hear it. The time was during Nazi Germany with Adolf Hitler. You see he brought crowds of clergy together to assure them that he was going to look after the church.
And one of the members, bold and courageous, Reverend Niemand (sp?) made his way to the front and (inaudible) said “Hitler, we are not concerned about the church. Jesus Christ will take care of the church.
We are concerned about the soul of Germany.” Embarrassed and chagrined, his peers quickly shuffled him to the back.
And as they did Adolf Hitler said, “The soul of Germany, you can leave that to me.” And they did, and because they did bombs did not only fall upon the nation of Germany, but also upon the church and their testimony to this very day.
Let us not make that mistake folks. Let us hear the bell! Vote on Proposition 8!”
Dacus is the guy who was the chief architect of the movement to get an opt-out law for parents to take their child out of any school activity that violates their religious or moral beliefs. Like say if a charter school asks the parents if they want to take their kids on a field trip to celebrate their teacher getting married. You know, the one they are conveniently forgetting about and then lying in their ads about education and teh children.
Surf over to Calitics for action items as well as additional video.
There has been a large dustup in the blogosphere and in the media over Elizabeth Dole’s fraudulent ’Godless‘ ad portraying her as cozying up to atheists, so much so that Dem challenger Kay Hagan has a new commercial out addressing the matter:
I’m Kay Hagan and Elizabeth Dole’s attacks on my Christian faith are offensive. She even faked my voice in her TV ad to make you think that I don’t believe in God. Well, I believe in God. I taught Sunday school; my faith guides my life. And Senator Dole knows it. Sure, politics is a tough business, but I approved this message because my campaign is about creating jobs and fixing our economy, not bearing false witness against fellow Christians.
It’s a strong response, placing the tactics directly on the MIA senator (note there’s no mention about the MIA senator’s anti-gay mailer that bashes Hagan as a liberal and in favor of marriage equality (she’s not).
UPDATE #2: The person standing next to Hagan in the ad, one of the alleged Godless Atheists, isn’t one (The Independent Weekly):
Both ads feature shadowy photographs of Hagan standing next to a nameless gray-haired man—presumably one of those atheists to whom the Democrat is allegedly indebted. He is in fact, Charles Frederick (Rick) Stone III, who currently studies theology at the Harvard Divinity School. Until his 2007 move to Boston, Stone lived in Greensboro and taught Biblical studies at Greensboro College, which is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, and Guilford College, which draws on Quaker tradition.
His courses have included Old and New Testament, religious law, and the teachings of Jesus. Stone himself is Episcopalian and a believer in God.
That’s rich. I hope Hagan bankrupts Dole.
A couple of things about the “Godless” debacle trouble me, aside from the base mudslinging of Liddy in her last gasps of desperation. 1) Dole is saying there’s a religious test to serve in public office; 2) Hagan has to respond in a way that affirms this, though she attempts to redirect by saying she plans to focus on the secular. It’s troublesome all around that candidates have to drag personal faith into a discussion about fitness to serve office. For goodness sake, what if an atheist wants to give to her campaign? I’m sure Dole has some atheists on her mailing list of donors. Does it not occur to the surgically preserved senator that non-believers simply want to select a candidate that will address the economy or the host of other issues, given the state the U.S. is in? It’s all ridiculous.
***
But back to Dole on another matter that has received scant attention in this state—immigration. The ads have been inflammatory, full of fear-baiting. More below the fold.
To save you the pain of reading the several thousand words encompassing this startling case that will change everything you know forever, Atlas Shrugged thinks that Malcolm X is Barack Obama’s real father. And he was born in Seattle.
Now, you might ask, wouldn’t Obama being born to his mother, an American citizen, and Malcom X, an American citizen, fundamentally destroy the entire case that conservative whackjobs have been building about Obama actually being a foreign citizen who’s ineligible to run for the presidency?
Of course they do. Because the first thing they teach in Wingnut Night School is to always back up your work.
I now understand that at least half of the state attorney generals in the country will challenge Obama’s residency before certifying his nomination. Lawsuits will be filed to clarify Obama’s birth in the United States.
Until today I simply believed that Obama was born in Hawaii. After doing some research I found it is not so clear cut. Obama may have been born in Canada or even Kenya. The birth certificate he has provided as proof of live birth is flawed. The first one his election team provided had no certification seal. The second had the seal and fold marks.
There is also a “Barrack Hussein Mohamed Obama” born on 23 August 1961 in Canada—which is where people are saying Obama was really born—not Hawaii.
The proof for this? There is none. Quite literally, none. But it does proffer the perfect bookend to the greatest story ever told: Malcolm X had a love child with a University of Hawaii student who moved to Seattle and he then made go over the border to Canada to have a child whose parentage and name he then conspired to give to a Kenyan national still in Hawaii and then manufactured a fake birth certificate to hide the fact that the kid was born in Canada, despite the fact that he would have been born to two American parents and therefore an American citizen anyway.
It’s like Look Who’s Talking, except that John Travolta gets shot in the end.
UPDATE: I demand a DNA test be done between Barack Obama and Malcolm X’s closest living relative, Denzel Washington.
* Item: John Derbyshire has everything figured out about the Sixth Mysterious Tape Of Obama:
* Item: The Los Angeles Times is owned by the Tribune Co.
* Item: The Tribune Co. is based in Chicago.
* Item: “In 2008, Tribune is struggling under a $13 billion debt load, much of it incurred in taking the company private in 2007, and from plummeting advertising income at its newspapers.” (Wikipedia. A business friend tells me the current figure is actually $14.7 billion.)
* Item: Tribune Chairman and CEO Sam Zell is a major Republican donor. Why would he not want his paper to release the Khalidi tape?
* Item: The federal government is sitting on a bailout fund of $700 billion.
* Item: It’s not likely the Treasury can disburse more than one or two hundred billion of that before the next administration comes in.
* Item: The next administration will therefore have at least half a trillion greenies to hand out to anyone it deems worthy of being bailed out. Anyone — there are no hard and fast rules.
* Item: 14.7 billion is a very small proportion — less than three percent — of half a trillion.
* Item: That is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard in my goddamn life.
* Item: I have read dozens of Chick Tracts.
* Item: Joe the Plumber only needs $1.3 million to open his combination nightclub/lure store.
* Item: Just saying.
I know this close to the election, I probably should be writing about electoral politics, but I have to take some posting time to register my annoyance at Beyoncé’s first single released as her unwitting drag queen persona, Sasha Fierce. The ladies at Broadsheet tackled the single “If I Were A Boy”, so I won’t bother with that. Plus, as annoying as that song is, it didn’t get on my nerves in nearly the same way that the other song they linked did. This is not the official video, which has embedding disabled, but you can hear it:
Actually it’s a clown bus, not a clown car. The remaining staunch support of John McCain lies in the Base—the hard case bible beaters, the Freeper set, the low, low, low info voter, and those simply scared of change. Jonathan Stein over at Mother Jones attended a stop on the Our Country Deserves Better PAC’s “Stop Obama” tour.
You know all those ridiculous wingnut screams of “socialist,” “Muslim,” etc.? Well this event at the National Press Club was a cornucopia of batsh*ttery. They have strong Kool-Aid on the tour bus. Look at some of the current conspiracy theories about Barack Obama. They are below the fold.
I noted in comments that you wouldn’t see the last of my Sarah Palin costume. Marc and I hit the studio and made a short, but I hope moving, story about the inner turmoil Sarah Palin goes through after lambasting Obama for knowing Bill Ayers, when she herself has her own dark terrorist palling around secrets.
I’m enjoying dressing up as Sarah Palin a bit too much, and for this video I got my hairdresser to put my hair in a bouffant. It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to being a drag queen. In fact, I considered performing under the drag name Sasha Fierce, and then I was informed that it was already taken, so I went with my own name.
John McCain isn’t really closing in this race. Over the past three weeks, Obama’s lead has oscillated wildly (massively!) between between 5.5 and 8 points. His current average RCP lead is 6.2%, which is right in the middle of that range and about as high as he ever was at any point before our entire financial system crashed.
But McCain has done one thing more successfully than anything else since he announced Sarah Palin as his running mate - sold the narrative that the race will inevitably tighten for him, and that any result which shows a closer race is evidence of a trend, no matter how fleeting or random the result is. The worst example (of the morning) is this article from Florida Today, entitled “Poll gives McCain lead in Fla. early voting”. It would be fine, except that there’s another poll, referenced in the same piece, which shows Barack Obama destroying the holy hell out of McCain in early voting.
A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll gave McCain a 49-45 lead over Democrat Barack Obama among Floridians who have already voted.
[...]
Only a tiny fraction of the Florida respondents reported voting early, leaving McCain’s lead subject to a wide margin of error. A Quinnipiac University poll, released Wednesday, showed early voters favoring Obama 58-34, another small sample with a potentially wide margin of error.
Why would you favor one poll showing a statistical tie as showing a lead when another poll shows a massive blowout in the other direction? Because that’s the narrative!
Howard Fineman wonders why this race is still so close, and why McCain hasn’t been “put away” yet, which would be a great story if McCain had a single real poll from this month ever showing him ahead, or if Obama hadn’t had a winning margin in the Electoral College for, you know, weeks. The issue isn’t Obama not putting McCain away - the issue is that nobody will write that story for fear of being “unfair” and ending the race, meaning the only story left is how Obama may fail.
The other strange part of this narrative is that this Dick Morris article is an article of faith among those covering this campaign. If undecideds were going to break for Obama, they would have (which, of course, makes no sense, because you could make the exact same argument in McCain’s direction). It all goes to the same story, though - Obama, whether or not he’s actually closed this race out, will never be said to have done so, because it renders McCain’s campaign (and therefore the entirety of election coverage) as dead as a doorknob.
Obama’s being faulted for a structural deficiency in media coverage of the presidential campaign, and McCain hailed because there has to be some reason that a race Obama’s had won for weeks isn’t yet a “victory”. Just wait until Zogby produces that Monday poll showing an exact tie...my friends.
There’s a wonderful blog, 
Barack Obama favors his grandfather to a great degree. I wonder what the race-obsessed people who are scared of electing a black president think about this photo (
I’m never again going to doubt the wisdom of this campaign. At every step, when I feared that they were going off the rails, doing something that would imperil their chances at winning, it always turns out to be right. From the primaries to the general, when they make a move, they make it worse.
