I’m on day two of my blog hiatus. Not dead.
Archives for January 2012
Occupy the Toybox
Photograph: Sergey Teplyakov/vkontakte
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I would love this even I didn’t have a half-dozen tchotchkes on my desk right now. From the Guardian:
Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: “I’m for clean elections” and “A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin”.
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“Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests,” Andrei Mulintsev, the city’s deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week, according to local media. “In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event.”
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Activists set up the display after authorities repeatedly rejected their request to hold a sanctioned demonstration of the kind held in Moscow to protest disputed parliamentary elections results and Vladimir Putin’s expected return to the presidency in a March vote.
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Passersby admired the display with giggles, but police took it more seriously, examining its details and writing down each placard…
Worth clicking the link just to read the comments. I’m looking forward to seeing what American protestors can achieve with their homespun Makerbots and the fast-advancing field of 3D printers.
And then, * sigh *, there is the state-sanctioned “creative play” of this guy, complete with gender-biased color insult:
Send the Panty Sniffing Squad to Inspect Mitt’s Magic Underoos
Now that Michelle Obama’s underwear is up for discussion at all the usual wingnut sites, can we start talking about Mitt Romney’s? After all, for a Mormon, it’s “the most sacred of all things in the world, next to their own virtue, next to their own purity of life”, so I’d think that it’s something that Romney should discuss. Or are there two sets of standards, one for Mrs. Obama, and one for Mitt Romney?
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Open Thread
Don’t envy him his plane, you jealous leftists
We had an organizing event here Saturday, at a diner.
Angela Zimmann was there, she’s running for the US House:
And John Vanover was there, he’s running for the Ohio legislature. That is his first wife standing there with him:
We talked about a lot of things, but I think I can safely say the GOP primary is good for Democrats, based solely on this tiny and unrepresentative sample. It’s at least as reliable as my recounting an imaginary conversation with a cabdriver, so let’s just go with it. They’re really, really enjoying watching the GOP candidates duke it out, particularly the ultra-brilliant and learned Professor Gingrich, because they (of course) remember the old (real) Newt Gingrich, and not in a good way, either. A real walk down memory lane for them.
One other thing we talked about is how a local business owner has all but completed his conversion from Republican to Democrat. It isn’t new this change of heart, he publicly endorsed Obama in ’08, but he hadn’t really joined with Democrats until this year, when he came to our banquet and agreed to meet with all of our candidates. It’s a nice fit for us, too, because this business owner is not just a big employer, he’s a big union employer.
This public conversion is important to us, because we believe we need someone who is trusted who might make it okay to vote for a Democrat, if a disgruntled Republican or wishy washy independent was leaning that way anyway. We need someone to go first.
It’s especially interesting that our recent convert is sounding more and more like Woody Guthrie with each passing day because he is, in fact, a wealthy person. He and his family live quite modestly and unremarkably here locally, he lives close to where I live, but he also has three other homes in some really nice places. And a plane. He has a plane.
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I’m still not clear on why conservatives don’t want people voting early, yet they do want people voting absentee
Sunshine in the sunshine state:
Election experts and Democratic voting advocates told U.S. senators Friday that a Republican-backed overhaul of Florida election laws will suppress Democratic turnout in the nation’s biggest battleground state next fall.
Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida and Dick Durbin of Illinois held a field hearing at the Hillsborough County Courthouse that drew a racially diverse crowd that at times resembled an orchestrated Democratic rally. In packed pews in a sixth-floor courtroom, people wore yellow stickers that read “Our voice, our vote” and hissed a witness who defended the law.
Testimony centered on the most controversial changes: reducing early voting from 14 days to eight, from 96 hours to a minimum of 48, and ending it on the Saturday before the election; requiring third-party groups to register and face fines if they turn in voter registration forms after 48 hours; and requiring voters to cast provisional ballots if they moved from another county since they last voted if they did not update their addresses.
Nearly 200 people attended the hearing and about 200 more watched on TV from a nearby room. The crowd erupted into loud applause when Durbin said: “There are people literally fighting and dying for the right to vote in countries like Syria, and we are finding ways to restrict the right to vote?”
As the two-hour forum ended, Nelson said: “The rule of law has been assaulted in this state by this election law under the pretense of cutting down on election fraud.”
I think these field hearings are a great idea. Part of the problem with conservatives changing voting requirements every twenty minutes is that voters don’t know that the rules have changed or what, exactly, the ever-changing rules now require. The more attention voter suppression laws get, the better. Targeted groups have to know they’re targeted before they can act to protect their right to vote.
University of Florida political science professor Daniel A. Smith will testify Friday before several U.S. senators about Florida’s new voting law.
Smith was invited to the hearing by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.
The hearing, to be held in Tampa, will examine a Florida law that limits the time available for early voting, makes it more difficult for volunteer organizations to register voters and changes the cause for voters to cast provisional ballots.
Smith was selected by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s office to “speak from an academic viewpoint, not an activist’s,” Smith said. Smith was chosen as a witness because of his work on Florida election law and voting behavior.
Smith’s testimony will look at three features of the new law and how they potentially limit voting rights of Floridians.
“The first is early voting. The new Florida law truncates the early voting period from a 14-day window to an eight-day window, and most importantly, it eliminates the final Sunday before Election Day,” Smith said.
Early voting is popular with voters, yet Republicans are working hard all over the country to limit early voting. The crazed conservative assault on early voting makes even less sense than their other nonsensical, wholly imaginary claims re: voting, because there’s absolutely no difference between an early vote and an election day vote in terms of security or potential fraud. They don’t even have a remotely plausible storyline on Fox News on why we must limit early voting. They have nothing. People like early voting because it’s convenient. Conservatives oppose early voting because… well, we don’t know why conservatives oppose early voting.
Smith and Michael Herron, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, matched the voter file from the 2008 general election with the early voting file from that election, identifying trends such as which ethnic, racial, gender, or age groups were more likely to vote early in 2008, and how the new law likely will affect them.
Smith said they found African-American, Hispanic, youth, and first-time voters were much more likely to vote on the Sunday before the election.
Oh. That explains it.
Maybe at the next hearing we can discuss this:
Not mentioned at the hearing was that Florida has made it easier for voters to cast absentee ballots by mail as an alternative to early voting or visiting the polls on Election Day. But UF’s Smith said the highest likelihood of fraud involves absentee ballots.
If there’s a conservative lawyer out there who can defend the fact that conservatives push absentee balloting, the least secure voting method, while aggressively acting to limit early voting, I’d sure like to hear what they have to say. That doesn’t make any sense, unless they’re targeting voters who disfavor conservatives.
Reince, watch, repeat
What struck me about that clip from old man Schieffer that mistermix put up wasn’t so much how offensive Reince’s comparison was but how obscure it was. How many viewers could possibly have known who Captain Schettino is? I had no idea. I had heard of the crash, but not to the point where I knew the captain’s name. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe Italian ship disasters are exactly what Real Murkins like to talk about it around the Applebees salad bar, but I doubt it.
In 2008, I was similarly struck by how often John McCain would yell “field mice” or “bear DNA” at odd moments, and by how Mark Halperin and Chuck Todd thought this was a killer tactic, even though there’s no way most Americans had any idea what he was talking about. This set of Republican debates has been even worse, with the constant references to Saul Alinsky and silver dimes. What Atrios wrote a few years ago is more true than ever:
I’ve written before that I think part of the problem that conservatives/Republicans face is that their mythology has become a bit too complex for mere mortals (people who don’t listen to Limbaugh and read The Corner obsessively) to comprehend. They reference rogues’ gallery of enemies and various “bad things” that most people have never heard of. Simply trying to navigate through the various wingnutty minefields while throwing out the appropriate red meat has become difficult to do, and the result is incomprehensible to most of the country.
Here’s another example of what I’m talking about, in the context of the Christian right’s response to Gingrich’s anti-media debate tirade a few weeks ago:
The way Land sees it, Gingrich’s answer went beyond merely nodding toward the anti-media spirit among conservative Christian voters and reached forward instead to what they imagined would be an apocalyptic, nearly eschatological campaign between Obama and Gingrich. “They would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated by a real intellectual,” Land told me. “He would tear Obama’s head off.”
Evidence in support of Land’s analysis can be found in a webcast on the Internet site of Don Wildmon’s American Family Association. On the site, Matt Barber, an aggressive promoter of a socially conservative agenda, voiced unalloyed joy over a video celebrating the Gingrich-King confrontation like a nature show. Barber describes
footage of a lion chasing down a zebra. And then after the lion kills the zebra and looks up with his fur bloody, they switched back to a picture of Newt Gingrich with blood over his face. He had just made a meal out of John King.
To most viewers, I’m sure Gingrich came across as a guy who was angry that his philandering ways were being discussed on tv, but to some on the right, Gingrich came across as an intellectual lion-eating zebra zebra-eating lion. It’s no wonder these debates are killing Republicans’ favorability with independent voters.