Month: July 2008

By Patrick Appel
A million spectators expected for Obama’s speech in Germany?

By Patrick Appel

Auren Hoffman writes:

Jonah Berger, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of Business, conducted a terrific study where he demonstrates that where people vote affects how they vote. Essentially, people whose voting booth is located in a church are more likely to put more weight into social issues, people voting in fire houses care more about safety, and people voting in a school tend to put more weight on things like education.

(Hat tip: Tyler Cowen)

by Chris Bodenner
Megachurch pastor Rick Warren will host the first forum featuring Obama and McCain.  As a moderate Christian leader who focuses on more "liberal" issues like AIDS, poverty, and the environment, could Warren become the new face of political Christianity, eclipsing Christianists like Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson?

In fact, as Marc reported last year, Warren may have sparked Obama’s run for the presidency:

Many Obama friends and advisers believe that the realization he actually could be president first hit Obama on December 1, 2006, which happened to be World AIDS Day. Obama appeared at the megachurch in Orange County, California, run by Rick Warren, the best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life and an emerging force in national politics. … Before an audience of socially conservative evangelical Christians, Obama then called for “realism” and advocated the use of condoms to control the spread of AIDS. As the next day’s Orange County Register described it, Obama received a “hearty standing ovation.”

Meanwhile, in an attempt to become relevant this fall, Dobson appears to be flip-flopping on his previous vow "not to vote for John McCain under any circumstances":

"I never thought I would hear myself saying this. While I am not endorsing Senator John McCain, the possibility is there that I might. … Barack Obama contradicts and threatens everything I believe about the institution of the family and what is best for the nation. His radical positions on life, marriage and national security force me to reevaluate the candidacy of our only other choice, John McCain."

By Patrick Appel
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled certain types of racial integration unconstitutional. Emily Bazelon looks at how some schools are adjusting to class-based system of school integration:

If Congress were to revise No Child Left Behind to encourage more transfers of poor students to middle-class schools, would poor students drag down their better-off peers? In the end, the prospects of class-based integration will probably rise or fall on the answer to this question. Socioeconomic integration may be good for the have-nots, but if the haves think their kids are paying too great a price, they will kill it off at the polls.

By Patrick Appel
David Wasserman, house editor of the Cook Political Report, on the congressional races:

If we take a look at sort of the localized effects that the presidential race could have, there are places in a lot of districts where Democrats are going to have to perform better than Barack Obama if they want to win, including a lot of freshman Democrats. I think a challenge for them is really going to be walking that tightrope and negotiating their support for the Democratic nominee with the needs of their own district and the desires of their constituents. In some other places, the likelihood of a Barack Obama wave really puts Republican incumbents in danger. As we get closer to the election, we can expect the races in Illinois 10, Mark Kirk, Connecticut 4, Chris Shays, and some other districts, to really more closely track the standing of the presidential election in those districts. I think those races are likely to tighten, and those Republican incumbents will need to outperform John McCain by say 5 points in order to survive, which is something that is not impossible for them to do, but it’s still going to require a serious effort.

He predicts the Democrats will pick up around 15 house seats in the fall. The rest of his discussion with Stu Rothenberg, Tim Sahd, and Tom Schaller is here.

By Patrick Appel
Alexis Madrigal argues serving pigeon is the next logical step in local eating:

…all pigeons need is a re-branding. Just as the spurned Patagonian toothfish became the majestic Chilean sea bass and the silly Chinese gooseberry became the beloved kiwifruit, pigeons can merely reclaim their previous sufficiently arugula-sounding name: squab.

I’ll pass, thanks.

By Patrick Appel
Crowley thinks Maliki’s remarks could help McCain:

But is it possible that such a shift in the Iraq debate could be a good thing for… McCain? Many voters were no doubt unsetlled by McCain’s (unfairly alleged) vision of a 100-year war. If the debate shifts to who can more effectively manage the logistics of wrapping things up, that would could well benefit McCain more than a sharp contrast about prolonging war in which McCain is taking the unpopular side. Obama can rightly crow in the short term, but I’m not sure it’s obvious this plays out in the longer term.

by hilzoy

For some reason, while I was researching various blog posts I got interested the differences between McCain’s and Obama’s websites, and in particular the policy information they make available. I think it started when I decided to check out reports that McCain had no energy policy. It turned out that you could find bits of one, if you were prepared to slog through his various speeches, but at the time, his Issues page did not have an entry for energy. (Now it does.) I then noticed that, as I said earlier, it doesn’t have an entry for foreign policy either. (It still doesn’t, though there is a page on Iraq.) I started poking around, and the contrast between McCain’s and Obama’s Issues pages is really striking.

Here’s a list of issues that Obama has a page on and McCain doesn’t: Civil Rights, Disabilities, Faith, Family, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Poverty, Service, Seniors and Social Security, Technology, Urban Policy, Women. That’s a pretty striking list. Moreover, he has a page called ‘Additional Issues‘ with links to plans on Arts, Child Advocacy, Katrina, Science, Sportsmen, and Transportation. Of these, only Sportsmen has a counterpart on McCain’s site. Finally, under ‘People’, you can find separate policy pages on issues relevant to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (one-pagers in six languages, a longer version in English), First Americans, Labor, Latinos, and LGBT.

That’s twenty five issues that Obama gives a page to and McCain does not. And some of them are pretty striking: Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, and Poverty are surprising absences in one way; Faith, Family, and Service in another.

Here’s a list of issues McCain covers that have no counterpart on Obama’s Issues page: The Sanctity of Life (question: why is “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers” part of McCain’s Sanctity of Life policy?), Judicial Philosophy, Space Program. If you hunt around, you can find a link to a little page with two paragraphs on autism which has, to my knowledge, no counterpart on Obama’s site. [UPDATE: in comments at ObWi, ulpian246 points out that Obama does have a page on autism.]

That’s four three issues that McCain gives a page to and Obama does not.

Moreover, Obama’s pages are a lot more detailed than McCain’s, and they usually contain links to both to pdfs that are even more detailed and to speeches Obama has given on the topic in question. Almost none of McCain’s do. This is a pity: McCain’s speeches often contain more detailed expositions of his policy than you can find on his Issues page, and on issues like foreign policy, they are the only source of information about what he thinks. But there is no systematic way to find them.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is any sort of serious critique of McCain’s campaign. I do think that issues pages give a rough guide both to the care with which a candidate has thought through the issues, and to which ones he gives priority to, but it is rough. (It’s a better guide to the professionalism of the campaign, as an organization.) I also love issues pages, myself: I recall the bad old days when “Position Papers” were something you had to actually write off to campaigns for: most people had no access to them at all, and so we were entirely dependent on the media to tell us what the candidates actually believed. The fact that we can now just go and read them all on our computers fills the once frustrated wonk in me with joy, and I like to see campaigns make it easy for us to inform ourselves.

(Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings. This is generally true, though I usually forget to say so.)

By Patrick Appel
The NYT gets ahold of the audio:

The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki’s comments by The Times: “Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.”

He continued: “Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.”

Seems pretty clear to me. Hilzoy’s take on Maliki’s statement is here.

by hilzoy

Irin News reports on a little-known side effect of the market for Ecstasy:

“The production of sassafras oil, which is used to make the recreational drug ecstasy, in southwest Cambodia, is destroying trees, the livelihoods of local inhabitants and wreaking untold ecological damage, according to David Bradfield, adviser to the Wildlife Sanctuaries Project of Fauna and Flora International (FFI).

The sassafras oil comes from the Cardamom Mountain area, one of the last forest wildernesses in mainland southeast Asia, and where the FFI project is based. (…)

Cambodian sassafras oil is highly sought after as it is of the highest quality – over 90 percent pure, according to the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Cambodia, Lars Pedersen. “Massive amounts of sassafras oil are smuggled every year into Vietnam and Thailand from Cambodia,” he said.

Sassafras oil is made from the roots of the rare Mreah Prew Phnom tree – also known as Cinnamomum parathenoxylon. The roots are first chopped into small blocks of wood and shredded into a fibrous consistency. This is then typically put into large metal vats and distilled over hot wood fires for at least five days in the oil distillation process.

“[The Mreah Prew Phnom] is a very rare tree that is now beginning to disappear because of the illegal distilleries in the Cardamom Mountains,” Bradfield said.

“The production of sassafras oil over the last 10 years has severely depleted these trees and if the illicit production isn’t stamped out soon, they could become extinct in the near future,” he warned.”

Apparently, the workers who distill the sassafras oil also eat and sell endangered species. Great.

Back in the day, when I was more attuned to these things, people didn’t seem to think much about the social and environmental effects of illicit drug use. That always seemed to me to be an odd blind spot: I knew plenty of people who worked for various good causes by day, and supported organizations that helped to destroy inner-city neighborhoods by night, for instance, without noticing the conflict between their principles and their use of cocaine. I suspect that that has changed. I hope so.