And Then There Were Six...

A while back, I predicted the election would come down to 13 states. I am now amended that to 6. Missouri and Iowa are going to go for the GOP no matter who the nominee is as the evangelical base in each state is very organized and motivated. And Iowa is doing comparatively better, economically speaking than the rest of the country so social issues are going to have bigger play there. And Missouri has really solidified its conservative base so it's going to be nearly impossible for the president or Senator McCaskill to win there.

But with Mitt's shenanigans in Michigan and the massive movement in Wisconsin to oust Governor Walker, the president can look forward to victories in those states. The heavy Latino population in New Mexico will also turn that state blue and New Hampshire, even with all its stalwart old guard conservatives, will also go for the president due to demographics (the youth and female vote). The latest polling out of Virginia also shows the president with very comfortable leads over all the GOP candidates. Again, we're talking demographics here.

So that leaves him with a likely 244 electoral votes. 26 to go and 6 states. Those states are Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. At this point, each of them could go either way but all he really needs is Pennsylvania (even John Kerry won that state) and just one more to put him over the top. So things are looking pretty good for the president at present.

Click here for my map: 2012 Presidential Election: Electoral Map:

The Sketch Heard 'Round The World

Eric Fehrnstrom, Senior Romney adviser, obviously had no idea the fury he was about to unleash when he made this comment.

 

In so many ways, this is Mitt Romney. As the likely nominee of the conservative party of this country, he's really not a conservative. He just plays one on TV. When the fall campaign starts, he's going to start to try to appeal to the independents of the electorate. But will he be able to do so after all the "Barack X" language that has been coming out of his mouth for the last several months?

As the recent Purple Poll shows, the president is doing very well with independents again so Mittens really has his work cut out for him. Having to spend the next two months moving farther and farther to the right will certainly not help. Check out his unfavorables on page 3. Wow!

Getting in Your Facebook

A lot of people complain about how much government is getting involved in our personal lives, how intrusive it has become, yada yada yada. But there's another force that's even more intrusive, who knows far more about you than the government and is in a position to use information that should be completely private against you.

Your employer.

Last month there was a big noise when the Obama administration announced its plans for contraception coverage. It took them two tries to get it right, but in the end most quasi-religious organizations will be able to opt out of covering contraception and have the insurance company do it instead. This still presents a problem with organizations that self-insure, but it points out the real issue.

Our employers has no business knowing anything about our personal lives. In particular, they have no right to know our medical history, unless we're claiming sick time or maternity leave, we've been injured on the job, or medical problems are affecting our job performance. Some jobs, like airline pilots and football players, obviously require closer scrutiny of the employee's medical condition. But with the vast majority of us, our medical histories should be between us and our doctors. Our employers have no business sticking their noses into our private business.

Yet employers more and more seem to think that they own us. For years employers have been pushing for invasive drug-testing beyond jobs like police, pilots, bus drivers, etc., and into office jobs where it really doesn't matter. They've been on employees' cases for quitting smoking, losing weight, getting more exercise, etc., mostly in service to cutting their health care costs.

Now some employers have begun forcing potential employees to give their Facebook passwords so they can peep into your private profile. This is a clear invasion of privacy, and it's also against the policies of Facebook and most every other online service: you're never supposed to give out your password.

What people say on Facebook doesn't necessarily represent the reality of their lives. And relying on Facebook for any kind of real information is an extremely dubious: if you've got something to hide you can just make a separate Facebook account that only your "in" friend know about. Even worse, anyone can make a Facebook account in your name and make it appear that it's yours.

One form of cyber-bullying involves creating fake Facebook identities for the victims, then making posts that get the victim into trouble, such as terroristic threats. This problem isn't particularly new, it's been woven into the plots of shows like CSI: New York for years now.


Everyone across the political spectrum claims to be for freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The real question is how to proceed when the rights and freedoms of different groups and individuals collide: for example, those of employers and employees.

Employers have the right to control what you do on their time and with their equipment: you shouldn't be wasting time shopping on Amazon, posting on Facebook or looking at porn on your work computer.

But as long as you show up for work on time and do your job adequately, your employer has no right to know whether you use contraception, drink two vodka Martinis every night, or what your Facebook password is.

Still More Facts

In many ways, I'm very happy the energy issue is out front and center right now in public debate because we are starting to see more articles like this.

More US drilling didn't drop gas price

A statistical analysis of 36 years of monthly, inflation-adjusted gasoline prices and U.S. domestic oil production by The Associated Press shows no statistical correlation between how much oil comes out of U.S. wells and the price at the pump. Political rhetoric about the blame over gas prices and the power to change them — whether Republican claims now or Democrats' charges four years ago — is not supported by cold, hard figures.

Oh really? 36 years you say?

Seasonally adjusted U.S. oil production dropped steadily from February 1986 until three years ago. But starting in March 1986, inflation-adjusted gas prices fell below the $2-a-gallon mark and stayed there for most of the rest of the 1980s and 1990s. Production between 1986 and 1999 dropped by nearly one-third. If the drill-now theory were correct, prices should have soared. Instead they went down by nearly a dollar.

Uh...oops.

Further...

Sometimes prices increase as American drilling ramps up. That's what has happened in the past three years. Since February 2009, U.S. oil production has increased 15 percent when seasonally adjusted. Prices in those three years went from $2.07 per gallon to $3.58. It was a case of drilling more and paying much more. U.S. oil production is back to the same level it was in March 2003, when gas cost $2.10 per gallon when adjusted for inflation. But that's not what prices are now.

.But what about Keystone?

Supporters of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline say it would bring 25 million barrels of oil to the United States a month. That's the same increase in U.S. production that occurred between February and November last year. Monthly gas prices went up a dime a gallon in that time. 

Facts, folks. These are facts. Read the entire piece as it contains many more hard statistics.

And what is it again that affects prices?

That's because oil is a global commodity and U.S. production has only a tiny influence on supply. Factors far beyond the control of a nation or a president dictate the price of gasoline.

Why is that so difficult for people to understand? Oh yes, that's right...Barack X and his army of killer robots that are destroying free enterprise in this country.

Of course, the ultimate irony here is that I'm beginning to think that supporters of increased domestic drilling are under the impression that the United States government would own the oil. They wouldn't, of course, because that would be socialism, right? So, the companies that would own the oil would be able to sell it on the free market.

Where do you think they would go and sell it?

Vote for me, I know nothing and hate the same things you do.

I finally got around to watching my TiVo'd copy of the HBO film, Game Change. Despite Sarah Palin's protestations, I found the film to be pretty much accurate and, not surprisingly, I'm still enormously frustrated that there are people out there still who think that she would be a competent president.

A recent piece by Richard Cohen over at RealClear Politics not only sums up the very core of Ms. Palin but also is extremely illustrative of what happens when the right gets caught in their willful ignorance.

The movie portrays Palin as an ignoramus. She did not know that Queen Elizabeth II does not run the British government, and she did not know that North and South Korea are different countries. She seemed not to have heard of the Federal Reserve. She called Joe Biden "O'Biden," and she thought America went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein, not al-Qaeda, had attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. Not only did she know little, but she was determinately incurious and supremely smug in her ignorance.

Being smug in their ignorance has now become a catechism. This is especially evident if anyone left of center confronts them with irrefutable facts.

At the same time, she was a liar. In the movie, she was called exactly that by McCain's campaign chief, Steve Schmidt, who came to realize -- a bit late in the game -- that one of Palin's great talents was to deny the truth. When confronted, she simply shuts down -- petulant, child-like -- and then sulks off.

Petulant and child-like..hmmm:)

Another thing about the film was the big reveal about the VP debate. I remember sitting in my family room and watching it with our very own last in line. After it was over, I turned to him and said, "Hey, she did a good job." Well, she did but, according to the film, it was all an act. She didn't have any idea what she was saying and simply memorized the lines. Great...

What's interesting about the rest of Cohen's piece is how he ties it to the 2012 election.

Apres Palin has come a deluge of dysfunctional presidential candidates. They do not lie with quite the conviction of Palin, but they are sometimes her match in ignorance...ignorance that has become more than bliss. It's now an attribute, an entire platform: Vote for me, I know nothing and hate the same things you do.

I think Sarah Palin was the spark that ended up given birth to the fictional character of Barack X. Many of his detractors (both public and private) simply can't accept the fact that he has been a good president and has done a good job. So, they ignore his accomplishments and create living pinata upon which they can unleash their hatred.

I guess I can take comfort in the fact that Sarah Palin will never be president and that the most ardent and extreme people like her really don't have as much power as the media makes them out to have.

A Problem With Math (and fundamental principles of markets)

A recent discussion in comments has once again illustrated the problems with facts and math that tend to come up when the right are talking about their fictional character, Barack X.

Their latest line of fantasy is how the president is responsible for high gas prices and if he would just unshackle the energy industry, we could decrease our dependence on foreign oil.

One small problem with this narrative is (as always) reality.

(Source: Energy Information Administration) 

The other reality item to consider is the world market.

(Source: Energy Information Administration) 

We could drill everywhere the right wants us to drill and it wouldn't matter. We will still be shackled to the world market.

So, the next time that mouth foaming uncle who gets his facts from right wing blogs says that we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, politely inform them that President Obama has been doing that.

Pander-monium

Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney went to Puerto Rico last week to campaign for delegates. While there, both Romney and Santorum pandered.

Romney pandered to locals in the normal way: he said nice things about Puerto Rico, and pledged to help Puerto Rico become a state if the referendum for statehood passes this coming November.

Santorum went to Puerto Rico to pander not to the locals, but to the middle-aged angry white men in the Tea Party back on the mainland. Though Santorum has endorsed statehood for Puerto Rico without preconditions in the past, he no longer supports statehood for Puerto Rico unless they speak English. He said:

Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law. And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language.

There's no such law. In fact, Puerto Ricans already enjoy American citizenship. They have to pay most federal taxes—they're enrolled in Social Security and Medicare—but they don't have to pay federal income tax. Many American companies have subsidiaries in Puerto Rico, and since it's a U.S. territory and workers are American citizens, they are eligible for security clearances. High-tech military contractors like Honeywell are therefore sending high-paying jobs to Puerto Rico to take advantage of the lower salaries and cost of living.

There are two basic kinds of pander: saying nice pleasant things to endear oneself to your listeners (Mitt's), and saying mean and incendiary things to incite vitriol (Rick's). Santorum's defenders claim he's just telling it like it is, and Romney is mealy-mouthed. But because there's no English language requirement for statehood, Santorum is either woefully ignorant of the law and therefore not fit to be president, or he's willfully lying about it to get votes. Since Santorum previously supported Puerto-Rican statehood, he's obviously lying now.

But he's just playing out the new "Southern strategy" that many Tea Party and anti-immigrant groups adopted the last few years. It is this core group of Republicans that Santorum went to Puerto Rico to pander to, solidifying his position as the one true Anti-Romney. In contrast to Romney's placid acceptance of Puerto-Rican self-determination, Santorum is pledging to inflict pain and humiliation on Puerto Rico before letting them into the club.

As it turned out, Romney got more than 50% and therefore won all 20 delegates. (Santorum apparently got only 8%.) This was expected, as pretty much the entire Republican establishment, including the governor of Puerto Rico, had endorsed Romney. Santorum almost certainly knew this, and knew going to Puerto Rico could not possibly win him a single Puerto-Rican delegate. The entire exercise was therefore cynically executed to maximally manipulate anti-Latino sentiment among the Republican base.

The thing is, it's not clear whether Puerto Rico really wants to become a state. When they voted on this in 1998, "none of the above" beat out statehood 50.5 to 46.6%. It's also not clear that Republicans would allow it to happen: with all the anti-Latino vitriol they've spewed in the last several years, they're probably afraid it would mean adding two Democratic senators and three or four Democratic representatives.

But Puerto Rico's current status seems wrong: they're essentially in the same boat the American colonies were in before the Revolution. They're subjects of some big country across the sea, but they don't get to vote for president or Congress. In other words, they are suffering from taxation without representation. That should get them some sympathy from the Tea Party.

He Said...What?

If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy. So you have to, at the same time, create pro-growth tax policies.---Mitt Romney, February 21, 2012, in Shelby Township, Michigan 

Uh...yeah, that's actually correct. How did we miss that one?

Oh, The Irony...

It's become quite obvious over the last several weeks that the mouth foaming that emanates from the right about the president's policies, as well as the federal government in general, is continuing to reach heretofore unseen depths of hypocrisy. A shining example of this is the states that continually vote Republican actually receive the most federal aid and tax dollars from the states that vote for Democrats.

But this one really takes the cake.

Plaintiff challenging healthcare law went bankrupt – with unpaid medical bills

Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama's healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue. Brown "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it," said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation's case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.

But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address.

This would be funny if it weren't so tragic. The willful ignorance here is simply astounding.

The truly frustrating part is that we all still end up paying for her anyway, as Wendell Potter, former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, recently noted...

Somebody has to pay for it. And guess who that is? It is all of us. Even Mary Brown. She and the rest of us cover that uncompensated care either through higher taxes to support the Medicare and Medicaid programs or through higher health insurance premiums. The care that presumably is "absorbed" by the hospitals is, in reality, being absorbed not by those facilities but by us. This is what the term "cost shifting" is all about. 

And this irrational way of paying for that so-called uncompensated care has us locked into a dysfunctional system in which costs for both the insured and the uninsured keep spiraling upward.

That's right, adolescent whiners, and that's why the PPACA is the best option at present. Scream all you want about it but simple and neat solutions to complex problems like health care don't fucking exist. Everything is not going to be perfect and we're just going to have to live with it...a truly hard thing to swallow for many people.

But, hey, at least those adolescents on the right will always have something to bitch about because it won't be perfect so that counts for something, hmm?

Not A Good Sign

Voter turnout thus far in the GOP primaries has been very low. In fact, it is lower than 2008 and that is not a good sign for the eventual nominee. A recent report from the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Center for the Study of the American Electorate details the numbers.

Overall, voter turnout so far is 11.5% of the 68.1 million citizens eligible to vote in the 13 states. That's a drop from a 13.2% voter turnout rate in the same states four years ago. 

And there really wasn't that much enthusiasm back then either. But what about the key battleground states? In Florida, 1.6 million people voted in 2012 compared to 1.9 million in the 2008 GOP primaries. In Nevada, the turnout in 2008 was 44,000. This year it was 32,000. That's nearly a 25 percent drop off. And in Colorado voter turnout was down about 7 percent this year in comparison to 2012.

Does this mean good things for the president?

Hmm...

An apt description of some of my commenters...:)

Where It's At

Well, the GOP primaries are slogging merrily along and Rick Santorum simply will not go away. That's because, as much of the base and the country knows, Mitt Romney isn't really a conservative. He is just awkwardly playing one on TV.

Now, most of you know that I like Mitt Romney personally and wish that he would just come out and be the pragmatic dude that I know he can be. But there's this little thing called the Republican nomination that he has to get first. And, since the GOP keeps moving further and further right every day, he has to play make believe and pretend that Barack X is building an army of robots programmed to take away guns and bibles.

But he just doesn't look like he's into it...talking about cheezy grits and y'alls and such...so, Rick Santorum just won three states in a row (Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi) and Mitt's inevitable nomination doesn't look so inevitable.

I think he's still going to win but I guess I'm wondering how far he is going to go in trying to get the nomination. What crazy crapola is going to come out of his mouth to prove to the base that he's a "severe conservative?"Likely it will be worse than his "the president is destroying free enterprise" comment but, hey, that's they ugly face of American populism that he has to placate.

Personally, I'd rather people go after Mitt on his foreign policy plans. What exactly are they? And how will they be more effective than President Obama's policies, nearly all of which have been successful?

No Shit

The Evolution of Princesses

It's springtime, and we all know what that means: the beginning of the blockbuster movie season. Last weekend Disney's John Carter opened, with many critics predicting its doom, pointing out that the viewing public has not been kind to movies about Mars. Speculation was rife that the movie—about a Civil War vet who goes to Mars—would bomb terribly. As it turns out, it wasn't a total dud; it did fairly well overseas so it may break even in the long haul. But prospects for a sequel—apparently the only criterion for success in movies—are bleak.

I liked the film. Over the years I've come to like historical dramas like Rome and The Tudors, alternative histories and retro-future Victorian steampunk settings. But I can see that for some John Carter might lack a certain pizzazz; it's more or less true to the understated tone of the Victorian era, and the characters don't have the same edgy sarcastic wit we've come to expect in summer blockbusters, even characters in the Victorian era like the Sherlock Holmes of Robert Downey Jr. The deserts of Mars feel more like Roman Egypt than Tatooine, especially with the casting of Rome's Ciaran Hinds and James Purefoy.

John Carter is based on  Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Barsoom novel,  A Princess of Mars. 2012 is the hundredth anniversary of its publication in serialized form in The All-Story, with the title Under the Moons of Mars. It was republished as a novel in 1917. (It's available for free at Project Gutenberg in HTML and e-book formats.)

Burrough's novels paved the way for the Tarzan movies and Buck Rogers serials in the thirties, which were the templates for modern blockbusters like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Arc. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells preceded Burroughs, but their work was somewhat abstract, while Burroughs's pulp fiction was full of rip-roaring swashbuckling adventure. And naked ladies.

Though I've read science fiction for more than forty years, I hadn't read any Burroughs until two years ago. My tastes tended more toward "hard science fiction" and writers like Asimov, Benford, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven, Varley, Zelazny, and so on. In my younger days Burroughs' Victorian writing style didn't attract me, and the social attitudes on race and gender expressed in his work, typical of his era, turned me off. Though I'm sure many of his contemporaries found his ideas outrageously radical and far too sympathetic to "primitives."

Making a movie from a book entails a great deal of condensation and restructuring. A two-hour film simply doesn't have the time to delve into subplots, or develop characters to the same extent a novel can.  Many characters have to be axed, or their functions must be combined into a single character. Often the conventions of a novel don't translate well into film.

Thus, many aspects of Burroughs' novel were changed: the mode of Carter's translation to Mars was altered to suit modern technological sensibilities; a new major character was added (pulled from a subsequent book in the series); even the characters' attire was altered—if filmed as originally written, the movie would have drawn an NC-17 rating. Did I mention naked ladies?

But perhaps the biggest change of all was the character of Dejah Thoris. As described in the novel, "She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure." Symmetrical?

Burroughs' Dejah Thoris was the typical damsel in distress. When they first met, she was depicted as the haughty, condescending daughter of a nobleman, though somehow even this endeared her to Carter.

John Carter's Dejah Thoris is thoroughly modern, recast in the mold of Princess Leia. She's the Martian scientist on the verge of a technological breakthrough that would save her planet, only to be sabotaged by the villains. She's a top-notch sword fighter, wears more armor than Carter and could probably whoop him in a fair fight (his great Earthly strength is a major plot point). She's a scholar who can read ancient languages. When she's ultimately forced into cheesecake mode, she disdains it.

Even the underlying theme of the novel and the motivation for Carter and Dejah Thoris to meet—the deteriorating Martian biosphere—is discarded. Instead they are brought together when she flees a forced marriage to the villain who threatens to enslave all Mars.

In short, the changes with Dejah Thoris directly reflect the changed role of women in society a century after the novel was published. Today many top scientists, CEOs and politicians are women. Women serve in the military alongside men, and in workplaces everywhere else. Since 2000 women have outnumbered men in college 57-43%. Women still have not attained true equality, though the college numbers indicate that women will eventually to catch up.

Yet a hundred years after Under the Moons of Mars was published we still have politicians like Rick Santorum whose attitudes toward women seem to be even more antiquated than Edgar Rice Burroughs'. Santorum rails against birth control and abortion and women in the military; he seems intent on returning women to the chattel status that John Carter's Dejah Thoris fled. Women are not dainty, fragile princesses who must be coddled and simultaneously blamed for inciting men to lust.

Whether or not John Carter enjoys box office success, it's another clear reflection that in popular culture and among the young the issue of women's equality and their right to decide their own fate has been decided. And that's not just Hollywood propaganda. Women outnumber men in the voting age population, and they may well decide the election this fall.

It's just a matter of time until people like Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, the pope and the ayatollahs give up the ghost and give women their due.

So...this happened today...

Nasdaq Closes Above 3000

First time since December of 2000. But what about the Dow?

13177.68, which is a gain of 218 points-its highest level since May 2008.

Yeah, Obama's a socialist who's destroying free enterprise and creating an air of uncertainty, alright...somebody stop him...Quick!