Month: July 2008

Bob Barr is close to a non-factor and McCain has a solid lead, according to Rasmussen’s latest.

Obama explicitly comes out against the proposed California marriage ban. Full text of his letter here. He needs to reiterate this often and hard on the California campaign trail. We need his help.

Ross Rosenberg digs up an anti-pornography film from the 1960s:

Part of me wishes these two gentleman had been able to see some of the more interesting corners of the internet, if only to have been able to see their brains leak out their ears.

You could see this coming a while back. Obama has long been comfortable talking about his moderate to liberal Christianity, and has long been very much at ease with the social Gospel and mixing religion with politics. George W. Bush, meanwhile, went a very long way toward integrating his religious faith with big government, providing conservative legitimacy to the notion of religiously infused state-funded services. Obama, for his part, has noticed that John McCain is extremely awkward when talking about religious faith in a political context, not terribly comfortable around holy rollers, and altogether a more secular figure. So put all that together and … ta da! The latest Obama counter-strike:

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans that would expand President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and – in a move sure to cause controversy – support their ability to hire and fire based on faith… David Kuo, a conservative Christian who was deputy director of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives until 2003 and later became a critic of Bush’s commitment to the cause, said Obama’s position has the potential to be a major "Sister Souljah moment" for his campaign… "It would be a very, very, very interesting thing," said Kuo, who is not an Obama adviser or supporter but was contacted by the campaign to review the new plan.

The rationale is laid out by the NYT today:

Mark DeMoss, a public relations executive who represents Franklin Graham and other church leaders and conservative religious organizations, said recently that Mr. Obama could conceivably win as much as 40 percent of the evangelical vote.

If that happens (and I can’t see how it will because of Obama’s abortion record), we’re talking about a historic landslide. But if only a fifth of them move over to the Democrat, we have a serious realignment – and possibly real movement in a few Southern states.

Patrick Ford defends Wall-E from conservative movie critics:

The real tragedy of these callous conservative critics (say that three times fast) is that they are missing the real lessons of the movie, ones I found immediately attractive to a traditional conservative. In the film, it becomes clear that mass consumerism is not just the product of big business, but of big business wedded with big government. In fact, the two are indistinguishable in Wall-E’s future. The government unilaterally provided its citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth’s downfall.

Well Lileks loved it. Not all conservatives are stupid ideologues.

David Brooks tries to paint a picture of Obama as a primarily elite phenomenon today – and it’s true that he does have major support among the educated, information age elite. But this is more than a "to be sure" paragraph:

When he is swept up in rhetorical fervor, Obama occasionally says that his campaign is 90 percent funded by small donors. He has indeed had great success with small donors, but only about 45 percent of his money comes from donations of $200 or less.

But that’s huge. What percentage of Bush’s campaign dollars were from donors who gave $200 or less? What’s so original about Obama’s campaign is that it has both. But that doesn’t make for an easy Obama-As-An-Elite-Phenom column.

Ambers notes:

Notice how the careful omission of a pronoun makes it sound like Obama himself "slashed" welfare — a nice and defensible trick of the trade. Actually, the word "passed" here is a bit out of context. As other news organizations have noted, Obama co-sponsored the bill, which brought Illinois into compliance with the ’96 federal law; legislators don’t pass anything. And it passed overwhelmingly — Democrats and Republicans in the Illinois Senate supported it; there was only one no vote And Obama glosses over his opposition to the ’96 federal welfare reform law.

"Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has “said it thrice” does not make an allegation true. See LEWIS CARROLL, THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK 3 (1876) (”I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”). In fact, we have no basis for concluding that there are independent sources for the documents’ thrice-made assertions," –  Judge Merrick B. Garland, of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, on the most recent Gitmo farce.

We should all encourage politicians to take long vacations, especially if they’re designed to take care of the hairy-nosed wombat.

This is called Chronotopic Anamorphosis, a new video technology. It gets better the longer you watch:

Chronotopic Anamorphosis from Marginalia Project on Vimeo.