Month: November 2008

The Blowback Against H8

Protests in Fresno and Redlands. And San Diego and Ventura. and Monterey and Laguna and Silver Lake. Rex Wockner’s blog is a must-read. I wonder how the new Harvey Milk movie will affect things. Kinda staggering they didn’t release it in time for the vote. A word to those discouraged by last Tuesday: don’t be. We will win because we’re right. It’s as simple as that. We are equal. We threaten no one. One day, the churches will be our allies. Don’t push anyone away that we will soon need. This is an opportunity as much as a setback.

A More Christianist GOP

Steve Waldman delivers the news:

Evangelicals made up an even bigger part of the McCain vote than the Bush vote. Born again Christians or evangelicals made up 36% of Bush vote and, by my count, 38.% of the McCain vote. Some of that results from non-evangelicals – Catholics in particular — abandoning the Republicans while evangelicals mostly stayed put. But the Republican ticket actually drew two million more evangelicals in raw numbers than George Bush did, presumably because of excitement about Sarah Palin and extreme fear of Barack Obama.

It will get worse before it gets better.

Franken’s Chances

Nate Silver tries to do the math. His bottom line:

Franken is anywhere from the prohibitive underdog in the recount to the prohibitive favorite…it’s very important that Franken’s deficit is is down to 221 votes, rather than the 700 or so that it appeared to be originally. Suppose that the Corretable Error Rate is 0.75%, and that Franken wins 50.5% of corrected ballots; we have him winning the recount 39.3% of the time under these assumptions. If, however, Franken had to make up 700 votes rather than 221, his win percentage under these assumptions would be just 0.008% percent — about a 13,000-to-1 longshot.

The margin is now down to 206.

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXII: “Harry Potter”

There were indeed some silly emails going around early in the fall campaign claiming that Sarah Palin had tried to ban Harry Potter books when she was mayor of Wasilla. This blog did not claim it, but I did note that she fired the town’s librarian. Here’s Wiki’s verdict on the whole fooferaw:

According to Laura Chase of Wasilla, and former Wasilla mayor John Stein, Palin as city councilwoman mentioned to her colleagues in 1995 that she saw the book Daddy’s Roommate in the public library and did not think that it belonged there. Chase later became Palin’s campaign manager for mayor in 1996, when Palin defeated John Stein, but the two had a falling out and Chase is now a vocal critic of Palin. City of Wasilla Library records indicate that there was never a request for the library to remove the book and that no books were ever censored or banned. The McCain-Palin campaign says that Palin was not advocating censorship.

Here’s Palin’s rebuttal of the charges:

"The banning books issue… easily disproved when it was reported that I tried to ban Harry Potter, and it hadn’t even been written when I was the mayor."

The first Harry Potter was indeed published in 1998, and Palin was Wasilla mayor from 1996 – 2002. And no actual response to the actual serious allegation.

Chickens

Ross thinks the Republican party is closing ranks:

Oh, the pundits will fight, as they have been for a while, but for a serious circular firing squad you need the activist groups to turn on one another. You might think that a defeat like the one the GOP endured last week would prompt Grover Norquist to argue that the Republican Party needs to ditch its warmongers and its theocrats, or prompt Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council to argue that the GOP needs to ditch its flat-tax obsessives, or prompt the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to complain about all those anti-intellectual hicks who loved Sarah Palin. But in practice the incentives probably cut the other way: Nobody wants to fire the first shot against their fellow movementarians, because then everybody else might just close ranks and train their fire in your direction.