Cogitamus

Our Buddhist Names

Feel like wasting a few minutes having a bit of fun?  Go here and divine your Buddhist Name.

Herewith, the entire Cogitamus Crew, a deeply meditative bunch if ever there was one.

litbrit = Aspiration Eloquence Queen
Lisa Simeone = The Girl Giver of Bright
Sara E. Anderson = The Girl Perceiver Firmly-Established Glow
Stephen Suh = Constellation Youth King
Sir Charles = The Monk Upholder Repository
Ankush Khardori = Tripitaka Master Awesome Grains
Nick Beaudrot = Diamond Upholding King
Neil Sinhababu = Dharma Teacher Holder Moon Banner
Dymaxion John = King Ever Treasure

Also at litbrit.

Texas Turnout

I think the folks at Burnt Orange report are serious lowballing the projected Texas Democratic primary turnout. In past primaries, week 1 early voting accounts for roughly 40% of early turnout. That means we can reasonably expect 900,000 early Democratic votes out of the fifteen most populated counties. In the 2004 Presidential election, 53.1% of those counties' voters voted early, and the counties accounted for 69.8% of the state's votes for John Kerry. Multiplying that out, we arrive at a turnout of ... 2.4 million voters, consistent with this primary season's pattern of 75,000-90,000 voters per congressional district. And I still think this is the low end of the projection; the 2004 election was a foregone conclusion in Texas, so voters had very little incentive to go to the polls on election day. With the contest over on the Republican side, giving crossover Republicans an excuse to vote D, there's an outside chance that Clinton and Obama will combine for more votes than John Kerry received in '04.

Update: tempering previous Texas boosterism, Charles Kuffner suggested there's a possibility that a larger share of voters will vote early this time, as both campaigns have pushed this message. But I wouldn't bet on it,

Jimmy Kimmel: "I'm F*cking Ben Affleck"

Following up on Sir Charles' earlier post, Sarah Silverman's "I'm F*cking Matt Damon".

Because we can all use a good laugh on this wintery February Monday:

Give Me Beauty or Give Me Death

                                       

Since I just watched the Oscars last night for my yearly glamour fix and was drooling over Helen Mirren's spectacular Georges Chakra gown (nobody can touch her; young women, take note: this is what mature beauty looks like), I thought it an appropriate time to post a little something on a more cheery personal obsession (more cheery than misogyny and torture and the bozo in the White House, etc.).  And I trust my fellow Cogblogger and beauty aficionado litbrit will join me.

It's That Time of the Year

It's also the time when Ralph Nader gets the urge to run for president, and since this is actually an election year, TRex and I figured we'd follow suit and announce our candidacies as well.

Bushes are red;
Violets are blue.
Ralph and Atrios and now TRex and litbrit are running--
You might as well, too!

(H/T Jezebel)

Things I learned from tonight's Oscars

One of my favourite pieces of writing from the West Wing was lifted wholesale from Tom Hanks' Oscar acceptance speech.

"The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels..."

And here:

I would not be standing here if it weren't for two very important men in my life, two I haven't spoken with in a while but I had the pleasure of just the other evening - Mr Rawley Farnsworth, who was my high school drama teacher, who taught me 'Act well the part, there all the glory lies', and one of my classmates under Mr Farnsworth, Mr John Gilkerson.

I mention their names because they are two of the finest gay Americans, two wonderful men that I had the good fortune to be associated with, to fall under their inspiration at such a young age. I wish my babies could have the same sort of teacher, the same sort of friends.

And there lies my dilemma here tonight. I know my work in this case is magnified by the fact that the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels.

We know their names - they number a thousand for each one of the red ribbons that we wear here tonight. They finally rest in the warm embrace of the gracious creator of us all - a healing embrace that cools their fevers, that clears their skin, and allows their eyes to see the simple, self-evident, common-sense truth that is made manifest by the benevolent creator of us all and was written down on paper by wise men, tolerant men, in the city of Philadelphia 200 years ago.

When Bill Left Office, She Was 12

As a 19-year-old Obama supporter was telling me the other day, one reason why people on college campuses prefer Obama to Hillary is that a lot of them simply weren't old enough to pay attention to politics when Bill Clinton was president. (She was saying that she remembered 3 things about Bill -- him playing his saxophone, people complaining about NAFTA, and Monica.) As a result, they didn't build the kind of support of Clinton that many older voters have.

I guess there are two ways you can run this -- that they don't have memories of how good things were in the 1990s, or that they didn't build the personal identification with Hillary that their elders did. The second seems like more of a powerful explanation than the first. Factual knowledge of the past is easy to transmit, but there's no way to duplicate the bond that a Democrat paying attention during the 1990s would form with Hillary in the face of the insane right-wing attacks she faced.

Rod Dreher's Neutrons

In the course of an excellent post on wedding dresses, Amanda shows us the collision between Rod Dreher's sexism and his desire to condemn Islam for sexism. In the end, Dreher resolves everything in a way that lets him keep accusing women who wear unusually revealing wedding dresses of "cheap morals"* and still distinguish himself from fundamentalist Muslims. Which is fair, since he hasn't actually stoned anybody, but you really wish he'd move towards a proper feminist appreciation of women being in control of their situations and rejecting patriarchal traditions so they can do as they please.

*In my professional opinion, the phrase "cheap morals" is similar to "abstract turnips" or "creamy neutrons" -- someone who thinks those two concepts fit neatly together probably doesn't fully understand the referent of the second term.

Oily Politics and Slimy Justice Systems

Gunk'd
Photo via Greenpeace

Exxon: They're banking record profits. They're filling our atmosphere with dangerously earth-warming carbon emissions. And when, in the process of conducting business doing their dirty deeds, they happen to wreck a fragile ecosystem and disrupt the lives of thousands of citizens, they use every filthy trick imaginable to evade justice.  Exxon will most likely never even begin to really pay, certainly not enough, for the cleanup and restoration efforts that, all these years later, have still not succeeded in removing the catastrophic quantities of spilled oil from the coastline of Prince William Sound.

And as for Exxon paying damages for the sins themselves?  Please.

When a federal jury in Alaska in 1994 ordered Exxon to pay $5 billion to thousands of people who had their lives disrupted by the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill, an appeal of the nation's largest punitive damages award was inevitable.

But almost no one could have predicted the incredible round of legal ping-pong that only this month lands at the Supreme Court.

If You're Going To Go Negative, Go Negative

The MOTD from the Hillary Clinton Campaign today is to whine about Barack Obama's direct mailings on health care [memo to self: write that post on "the politics of whining" on Obama, Bush, & Clinton you've been meaning to write]. Clinton continues to try to make the case that Obama's mandate-free health care plan is bad policy, in addition to selling out core Democrats values. But this just isn't going to sink in with a couple of press conferences. If Clinton believes that having a mandate is that important, and it's an issue with enough salience to help her politically, she should start doing what really works: running attack ads on the subject. They'd almost certainly be perceived as fair attacks, since they're issue-based rather than "character"-based. She'd almost certainly have the balance of experts on her side. And it would fit into her campaign's narrative that Obama's "hope & change, change & hope" shows he's not willing to fight for things worth fighting for.

I'm not sure what's holding Team Clinton back; Wolfson, Penn, and the rest of the bunch aren't exactly a bunch of shrinking violets. Perhaps will see something more substantial in advance of the Ohio debate.

Straight Talk -- Out of both Sides of his Mouth

St. John of the Straight Talk, having read and fully internalized his press clippings over the years as the defender of all that is true and good, went way out on a limb the other day in his press conference.  There was no equivocating, no "I can't remembers," just flat out denials of having done unusual favors for Ms. Iseman and her clients.  And now, I think I hear the sounds of saws starting to hum in the distance -- or to torture another metaphor, the beginning of the slow drip, drip, drip of contradiction that could spell huge damage to his candidacy.  [McCain's sanctimoniousness in this setting made me fully understand his bond with Joe Lieberman -- it's more than their love of the Iraq war -- it's their overweening sense of moral rectitude in the face of all evidence to the contrary.]

Today in the Washington Post, there is an article flatly contradicting claims not to have met with Lowell "Bud" Paxson before intervening on his behalf in an FCC proceeding.  Paxson also casts doubt on McCain's claim not to have met personally with Iseman over the same issue, as Paxson strongly believes that she was at the same meeting.  This comes a day after Newsweek published a story showing that McCain's press conference statements appeared inconsistent with his sworn deposition testimony given a few years ago about, among other things, his intervention for Paxson.  Moreover, it appears from the Post article that McCain wrote his second letter to the FCC on Paxon's behalf the day after attending a fund raiser on a yacht in West Palm Beach organized by Iseman's lobbying firm to which he was flown on a Paxson corporate jet.  The letter pressured the FCC to act by December 14, 1999, a date that was geared to the time sensitive nature of Paxon's transaction at the time.      

This, coupled with the McCain's campaign finance shenanigans, should be a devastating combination, if, and this is a big if, as a dear friend of mine noted this morning, the commentariat do their jobs and stop fluffing this guy 24/7. 

For Sara

Join us in thinking good thoughts and saying a prayer for Sara, who we are certain will be well and vibrant and strong in no time flat, rejoining our motley, lefty crew and rejoicing along with us in this historic year.

Think REALLY Big

Commandante Markos is entirely right about the National GOTV; Democrats need to think about using the once-in-a-generation candidacy of Barack Obama to pick up as many down-ballot seats as possible. He can have a big impact on US House and Senate contests, even in state's that he;d only win in a blowout. For instance, SurveyUSA has Obama down just six points—in Kansas. That six point gap is close enough that a Senate candidate with a strong local base could win; in 2004, two of the eight vaguely competitive Senate candidates ran more than 6% ahead of John Kerry (Brad Carson and Tony Knowles).

Democrats may not get another shot like this ever again, even during a hypothetical reelection campaign four years from now, since over two-thirds of the Senate seats up for reelection in 2012 will be held by Democrats. The time to try to shoot the moon is now. If there's even a puncher's chance at House or Senate seats in Wyoming, Kansas, Texas (yes, Texas, more on that later), Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina etc., Democrats need to make their move.

Friday Kitsch Cover

Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) sings Avril Lavigne's "Complicated". Hat tip: Ursula.

Post your nominations for the next Kitsch cover in the comments.

Schadenfreudelicious! Yet More Goodies From the Fantastically Hypocritical Moral Right

BREAKING...There must be something in the water that gets piped into the houses of certain Republican politicians in Arizona. In this case, something to help make doing the laundry a more rewarding task, perhaps:

WASHINGTON -- Republican Rep. Rick Renzi has been indicted for extortion, wire fraud, money laundering and other charges related to a land deal in Arizona.

A 26-page federal indictment unsealed in Arizona accuses Mr. Renzi and two former business partners of conspiring to promote the sale of land that buyers could swap for property owned by the federal government. The sale netted one of Mr. Renzi's former partners $4.5 million.

The three-term Republican announced in August that he would not seek re-election because of the federal inquiry.

Last April, The Wall Street Journal reported that a real-estate developer and former business partner gave Mr. Renzi $200,000 as part of a complicated federal land swap that benefited the developer and would have required Mr. Renzi's legislative help. Mr. Renzi's attorney at the time said the payment was an unrelated real-estate debt. Investigators subsequently began looking into several other allegations, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Internal Revenue Service are planning to publicly discuss the case shortly.

Also at litbrit .

Friday Frank: Easy Meat Solo; Paris, 1980

So, do you fancy hearing an absolutely stunning FZ guitar solo on this gloomy gray February day?

Thought so.  Enjoy!

Bon Weekend, everyone.

(H/T justanotherbrick)

Early Voting

While Markos notes that the largest increases in early voting turnout are in counties likely to go for Obama—Dallas, Houston, and Austin—it's worth noting that the percent of registered voters who've already cast their ballot is highest in Clinton counties. The Texas SecState's early voting statistics show that almost 4% of registered voters in Hidalgo County (Harlingen, along the Rio Grande) have gone to the polls; in Travis County (Austin), only 2.4% of the public has voted. In fact, the three counties with the highest turnout are all along the border. Of course, those counties have fewer people than the metro areas, and also fewer Republicans, but if they turn out in higher numbers and vote for Clinton 2-1, it will help her cancel out Obama's strength in the cities.

Then again, if reports like this are indicative of larger trends, it may not matter.

Climate Change

The maneuvering surrounding the current climate change bill is getting very intense. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, the next President potentially has as many as six large bills to pass: climate change, health care, tax reform, Iraq, immigration, and labor law reform. Now, you don't have to go to Congress to change the Iraq policy, so let's strike that off the list. And unless we get 59 seats in the Senate, EFCA isn't going to pass (Specter voted for it in the current Congress and likes his AFL-CIO support). But still, four large bills is an awful lot; in his first two years, Bill Clinton expended tremendous energy and passed only three—the budget bill, the crime bill, and NAFTA. In the second two years, he passed a Republican version of welfare reform. So there's a powerful argument to at least get the ball rolling on climate change now so that the next President's plate is quite so overflowing, and if it turns out Warner-Lieberman isn't enough to forestall calamity, then we can ratchet down the CO2 targets in a decade or so.

On the other hand, the fact that Warner-Lieberman used to be called McCain-Lieberman before the Straight Talk Express broke down on the way to the Republican nomination is a powerful campaign issue. And it's almost certain that the 111th Congress would produce a climate change bill that was less coal-friendly and made a more vigorous effort to reduce CO2 emissions; even though a number of green-ish Republican Senators will retire or lose this cycle, there are still a few that will stick around who can get you to cloture. There's also more consensus among conservative elites about climate change, which will make it easier to bring pressure to pass a stronger bill in 2009. So there's a powerful argument for waiting as well.

A lot depends on what you think the prospects are for getting health care reform through the next Congress. If you think it can happen, then passing climate change now makes sense. If you think there's no way to get it done, then you might as well wait 'till next year. Since I'm pessimistic on health care, I guess I come down on the "wait" side; you might as well try to get a better bill and use Republican recalcitrance as an issue in the campaign.

A Conservative's Conservative

John McCain is a conservative - a "foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution," if you will.  He's not only a conservative, he's a conservative who can only win as a conservative with the backing of this nation's conservatives.  Of which he is one.

As a conservative, John McCain knows what he's up against:  liberals.  Tax & spend, cut & run liberals.  They probably even order skinny lattes.  These liberals "want to increase the size of the federal government, raise your taxes, and withdraw our forces from Iraq based on an arbitrary timetable designed for political expediency." 

But not the conservative John McCain.  In the true spirit of conservatives, especially conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, he will reduce the size of the federal government.  He will cut taxes (well, he probably would do this one) and make sure that our sons and daughters are dying in Iraq for no good reason at all until 20,008!

The email from Townhall.com, reeking of McCain's desperate desire to have the people in this country who hate him the most unite behind his candidacy, can be seen after the jump.  This email looks to me as if someone took a standard GOP campaign template and just switched names and dates to make it current. 

But I am convinced that McCain could beat Dukakis in a landslide.

Doing Texas Proud

Everybody seemed little peppier than usual on campus today. It wasn't the let's-work-ourselves-into-a-burnt-orange-lather excitement that I often see during football season -- it was people naturally being excited that something important and valuable was happening on campus. I didn't win a ticket in the drawing so I didn't get to go to the gym where the Clinton-Obama debate was being held, but I did watch from the student union where over a hundred people were sitting in front of the TVs. I think most of the people who I saw clapping or nodding during the debate clapped or nodded for things that both candidates said.

My feeling is that Obama pretty decisively won the plagiarism fight, for anyone watching the debate -- sure, Clinton had the memorable "Change we can Xerox" line, but the media is reporting that the audience booed it. Obama gave a sufficiently good explanation of why his speech sounded like Deval Patrick's (they talk to each other a lot and had the same idea, and isn't this all silly?) to satisfy me. Clinton's closing statement was excellent, though, and I think she did pretty well in a lot of other places. The moderators did a pretty good job, too -- the questions were mostly on substantive topics, even if they were sometimes focused on odd aspects of those topics ("Will you meet with Raul Castro?" rather than "Will you end the embargo or otherwise change Cuba policy?")

But the big winner tonight was Ezra Klein. The candidates occasionally ignored the moderators to keep fighting about health care mandates, which was fine, because it's probably the biggest domestic policy difference between them. Can we please get Ezra or some other health care wonk on TV to explain how all this works? The candidates basically made that into the central issue of the debate. Of course, the media coverage is going to be on the much more superficial plagiarism point. But the debate was basically crying out for a policy person to immediately appear on TV to explain what the whole health care mandates issue is about. When they cut right to the Dial-o-meters of who won or lost, I left.

Barack Obama: Leftist Tyrannist

I hadn't noticed this before, but Barack Obama is a southpaw, meaning that should he win the election, three of country's last four leaders will hail from its left-handed minority. How long will the righthanders of America stand for this!

A Big Media Bleg

Apparently I was on CNN this morning as the result of an interview I did at Drinking Liberally Tuesday night. It was on young voters being involved in politics, and the cameras saw my freshly shaven face and thought, "Hey! there's a young person!" If anyone knows where a clip can be found, please let me know where it is!

Update: Here's the transcript. My moment of glory comes when they ask me why so many young people are getting excited about politics these days and I say "We've just had a lot of really gripping things happen in the world over the last -- in America over the last -- you know, since Bush got elected. The Iraq war, stuff like that. That's another thing that just gets people into, oh my goodness, how can we keep this from happening again."

It's a big mess of run-on sentence action, and I'm hoping it looks better in video than in transcript. But I think the general point -- young folks are getting involved because of horror at Iraq and other Bush administration screwups -- got across. The preceding "Candidate's spouse" comment is a sound snippet drawn out of a separate conversation.

On Gods, Monsters, and Smoking Guns

I've been closely following this terribly interesting scandale du jour and watched Senator John McCain's presser this morning.  And I have to say, if ever there was a biased bunch of media folk--a group so emotionally invested in the shiny narrative of War Hero Turned Maverick God, they can't see the obvious, business-as-usual reality before them even as it sprouts fangs and scales and claws--it's the morning crew at MSNBC.

Morning Joe kicked off at 6:00 am with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski complaining away about how the NYT was so irresponsible, how this non-story had no substance because the reporters didn't name the two independent sources from the campaign (I mean, if you were one of those people, wouldn't you be a bit scared?), and repeating over and over that This.  Was.  A.  Non.  Story.

In fact, it was such a non-story, they exclusively devoted their lede fifteen minutes to it.

Sillier Season

Kevin Drum is right; the volume of inane stories is definitely on the uptick. In addition to the three quasi-stories he mentioned, there's also a fourth, as the press has started writing a meta story about how the 'outspoken' [a word almost exclusively used to describe women] Michelle Obama causes trouble for her husband by making off message remarks, lately the "for the first time in my adult life, I'm really proud of my country" dustup. But let's run down all of these:

• The plagiarism BS seems to have mercifully ended. There are only so many ways to say the same thing. Deval Patrick and Barack Obama are friends and have the same chief strategist. Nobody cares.
• The "media backlash" isn't so much a backlash as the press beginning to revert to general election coverage mode, which treats the campaign as a status competition between two cliques in middle school. Indeed, Team Obama has successfully begun to combat the meme that all he does is give a good speech.
• The Times story on Iseman and McCain's dalliances with many ethical gray areas where many politicians go, but McCain professes to avoid out of ethical concerns, seems tepid. Well, more accurately, the bits about the sex, which of course has everyone foaming at the mouth, seem tepid But as Josh notes, there's a lot of non-denial denial coming from the McCain camp, and McCain had preemptively pushed very hard to spike the story. Meanwhile McCain's known adulterous behavior before the divorce of his first wife to marry Cindy Lou Hensley, heir to an Anheuser-Busch distributor, sure looks like one of those "character issues" the press keeps telling us the American people find important.
  
  On the non-sex front, of course, Team McCain's non-denial denials look less forceful, because after all, John McCain is just another politician, and while he may have a greater sense of honor than most, in thirty-five years in Washington there are bound to be some favors somewhere.
• It looks like the Obama camp has successfully put "proud" back in a box. Michelle  was proud of how Americans were getting engaged in the political process. Time to move on.
• Let's also use this as your weekly reminder that Barack Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim [not that there's anything wrong with that] who leads the Senate in the pledge when he presides and stands with his arms at his side during the national anthem.

And yet it's only February. If I plead "make it stop" will it do any good at all? Is Nepal remote enough that there won't be any election coverage there?

Your World In Maps: Texas & Ohio Media Market Edition

These maps, courtesy of something called the Echostar Knowledge Base, show the Nielsen's Designated Market Areas (DMAs) for the two big March 4th primary states. They're slightly out of date, but they give you a rough sense of how things work.