Quote For The Day II

“Well, I was drunk. I guess I wanted to be famous but I am now regretting. Prison life is no good. I realised we have broken the laws. I am calling this off. I am not crazy. I have another woman I intended to marry but I loved Tiwonge. I guess I should apologise to that other woman,” – Steven Monjeza, one half of the Malawian same-sex couple who got married – only to be threatened with a prison sentence of 14 years and now subjected to beatings in jail.

Fact-Checking Politico

An article on Scott Rasmussen simply regurgitates his bio, which claims he has been “an independent pollster for more than a decade” and “has never been a campaign pollster or consultant.” Think Progress does the work:

According to the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity, Rasmussen has been a paid consultant for the RNC and President Bush’s 2004 campaign. The RNC paid Rasmussen $95,500 between 2003 and 2004 for items listed as “survey,” “survey cost” and “voter data.” Bush’s campaign paid Rasmussen $45,500 for “survey research.”

Ouch.

Another Sort Of Blog War

Friedersdorf has an idea:

What if sometimes bloggers approached pieces as a skeptical editor? That posture still involves pointing out the weakest parts of a piece, but the critique is less adversarial — perhaps so much so that folks who’d otherwise dismiss dissent wind up seeing how the weaknesses in their arguments undermine even what they’re trying to accomplish.

Or: try thinking rather than just emoting. Which is easier said than done when blogging in real time.

The View From Your Recession: Checking Back In

This reader was a project and quality control manager who worked primarily in concrete. Original post here. The reader writes:

My optimism about finding another job in construction within a few months after getting laid off last March turned out to be badly misplaced. It's been nine months and counting and I have yet to find a job – I haven't even landed an interview after sending out maybe a hundred or so resumes. I've personally talked to the top project managers on some of the major heavy civil projects in the area (Metro extension, Virginia HOT lanes), but have come up empty. It's a terrible job market right now, plain and simple.

I spent about two and a half months during the summer helping a friend do some renovation and home improvement work on his house for some pretty decent CUT (Cash Under the Table). However, the contractor he hired to do the work was forced upon him by his father in-law and turned out to be a thief, a liar, and a lunatic; I hated the guy with a passion and felt like quitting on numerous occasions, but my friend's a great guy, his wife had just given birth to their second child, and it would have been a real shit move to just up and walk away amidst so much chaos.

In terms of personal finances, I have unemployment through June 2010, my personal savings, and the generosity of my family. The unemployment helps but it's not nearly enough and it certainly doesn't cover my bare-bones monthly expenses, like the mortgage, car payment, and condo fee. As I wrote last March, my condo's 5-year ARM resets in August 2010, and I anticipate that my monthly mortgage payment will balloon significantly; renting it out looks more and more like the most sensible thing to do since 1) it's still badly underwater, so refinancing is out of the question, and 2) it's still badly underwater, so selling it would cost me more money than I can afford to pay off right now. Also, unless Congress acts to extend COBRA subsidies, my monthly payment for health insurance will triple starting next month.

So right now life is somewhat bleak from a professional and financial standpoint. But I still have my family, especially my dog and my brother's dog (I can send pictures if you want), and I am not destitute. I'm very fortunate that I don't have a wife and children to support, otherwise I would be in much more desperate straits.

I've applied to business school at Virginia Tech in their executive MBA program and am currently scrambling to get letters of recommendation and financial aid forms squared away, since they told me that there was still space available for the cohort starting in late January. I'm hoping that a business degree will arm me with certain skills that I have not been able to develop over the past several years, particularly in finance and accounting. (Nearly five years in management in private business taught me an object lesson: you learn only the skills that your superiors want you to learn. But it's up to you to go out and get the specialized knowledge that will make you dangerous.)

Is Rasmussen The Only Correct Poll?

A reader writes:

I understand why you do it and I also understand the meme being pushed by some liberals that Rasmussen is biased. (read Nate Silver's latest) but if you don't think that President Obama has a backlash problem you have your head in the sand. I live in one of the reddest states in the country but at Christmas parties, family gatherings and even on business calls there is a rage at the President and the Congress that I have never seen. Its 1994 squared and as the economy gets worse it is going to get ugly (see Mr. Sunshine Paul Krugman today). The Republicans are already running ads in my congressional district attacking a Democratic congressman who normally gets 55-60% of the vote over health care and the economy.

In this sense, Rasmussen probably is accurate. In the reddest states, where the media is basically Fox, the intensity of Obama-hatred is obviously real (just look at the bloggy right). This little apercu from the NYT about Alabama is probably on the mark:

“The average guy out there walking the streets, he doesn’t know how anybody votes,” said Larry Lee, who has run for the seat as a Democrat three times. “They hear all this stuff about Obama’s making us all socialist and Pelosi’s riding a broomstick to work. I think he’s going to have a very tough row to hoe.”

I suspect that the turnout from these angry white voters may well be very strong in a protest election this coming November. But, even so, that doesn't mean this sub-section represents national opinion at this moment in time on issues unrelated to 2010 or that even this sub-section will be in the same mood in a few months' time. Nor is it clear that a promised Republican repeal of health insurance reform wouldn't galvanize some of Obama's base. And there's the problem of reconciling two different realities in the polling – Rasmussen and everyone else. I guess I'm going to keep removing Rasmussen, while offering their alternate reality from time to time as a constant predictive possibility for November 2010.

Why Not Torture The Crack Dealer?

Yglesias poses the question:

I would be interested to know how far the public—or how torture-loving conservative elites—would be willing to go on this. In a lot of ways terrorism cases strike me as unusually unpromising venues for torture. Something more banal like trying to get a low-level drug dealer to spill the beans on his supplier could really work. My view is that routinized deployment of brutality by government officials isn’t going to produce any systematic gains, so it doesn’t make sense to uncork this kind of treatment on Abdulmuttalab or Generic Drug Dealer X.

But for torture enthusiasts is there anything special about terrorism suspects?

By the reasoning of Cheney, many more lives would probably be saved – especially if torture was allowed before any due process, as happened under the Bush protectorate – and since that's the entire utilitarian rationale for torturing suspects, I don't see why people like Yoo and Thiessen object in principle. Yoo and Thiessen already endorsed the brutal, barbaric torture of an American citizen, Jose Padilla. So what's stopping them with other American citizens breaking the law?

What's stopping them, obviously, is not the rule of law which bans torture (they threw that out in 2002) but the lack of a desire for revenge. Which is what torture is always really about.