Following the Buffalo

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

That, my friends, is a grammatically correct sentence. And though I don't understand quite why, the fact that it is gives me real faith in humanity. Maybe it's because that we could come up with a language so peculiar, and still put men in space and bring them down again, shows that we have a lot of built in redundancy, which will see us through the rising of the seas and the coming apocalypse.

Happy belated Easter to those of you who go in for such things!

JEK
Thinks he should buy some land in a higher state.

The Math

I am lazy. Lazy, and suffering a stomach ailment. Both prevent me addressing the election with anything more than vague qualitative methods. And certainly I am in no shape to do what I would otherwise do, with less laziness and more gastrointestinal reliability: go to the Clinton camp and challenge their senior advisors with delegate math. But the people at Politico have done the math, and have stronger stomachs, and have come out with this article, which says, in short: not gonna happen for Clinton, and they kinda know it. And the press is crazed for pretending otherwise. All of which, qualitatively, I agree with. The painting of this campaign as anything other than a very, very long shot for the Clinton camp is both irresponsible and commonplace. As the boys (and yes, they do all seem to be boys) at TPM acknowledge, theira culpa.

JEK
When a reporter, used to chafe at being told to create storylines that didn't fit the facts, but usually did as he was told. Does not believe a long Democrat nom process helps anyone except Rush Limbaugh + friends.

Hey, Al Franken is running for Senate.

Hey Al Franken is running for Senate in Minnesota. You might not know that, because it hasn't gotten much national coverage, but it's not a joke. In fact, he's doing quite well. He's running away with the Democratic nomination and a month ago was virtually tied in polls with Norm Coleman, the republican incumbent. But Franken doesn't say he's running for Coleman's seat. Rather he says he's running to kick the one term senator out of Paul Wellstone's seat.

You may recall, Wellstone was a democratic senator for Minnesota from 1991 until he died in a plane crash along with his wife and daughter in 2002, only 11 days before Minnesota voters had to decide whether to re-elect him for a third term. Despite Walter Mondale stepping in to replace Wellstone, his opponent Norm Coleman narrowly won in an emotional election. Since then, Wellstone has been idealized (perhaps overly so) as an advocate for peace, the environment and all sorts of dis-advantaged people from illegal immigrants to abused housewives. Tales about Wellstone take on a mythical feeling, such as voting against authorizing the war in Iraq even though he was convinced it would cause him to lose his re-election campaign against Coleman. Minnesotans proved otherwise and the next day, he surged ahead of Coleman in the polls and seemed on the road to re-election. 13 days later he was dead. In that emotional context, Franken, who was a friend of Wellstone, is running to reclaim his seat.

There's an old adage in entertainment that says "If you wanna make 'em laugh, first make 'em cry. And if you wanna make 'em cry, first make 'em laugh." Too often, politics is an interesting subject communicated by very very boring people, and because of that the emotion is lost. On the other hand, sincerity and humor shine, make people think and make people care.

Check out this clip of Franken on Letterman shortly after announcing he would run for Senate. He uses humor, but he's well informed. And at the end, (starting around minute 12) he makes 'em cry.



Your home for Al Franken coverage:
http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/senate/

POHS
midwesterner

The Speech, and Some Context To Put It In

Just wanted to be sure that the video of Obama's speech today was easily accessible. It's here.

And to point out the views of the New York Times Editorial Board about it, which were positive. I think the context of this speech is something I can't really get. I wasn't around for JFK's catholicism speech, or MLK, or, obviously, the Second Inaugural. But I do finally feel like I can imagine what it might have felt like to see those moments in the making.

JEK
Imperfect, but always perfectable

Yin and Dang

The full text of Obama's speech today on race and US race relations is worth reading in its entirety. Yet again, he's put a voice better than my own to thoughts I've had for a long time. Reading it gave me chills. Imagining those words coming from a sitting President made me want to cheer out loud, and imperil the pipetting of my colleagues.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the soundbite of choice is the most mundane moment of all -- the part where he addresses his personal relationship to Wright, rather than the part where he puts the country front and center, and offers a prescription for faith and perseverance. But even that moment is pretty great, particularly if you watch it on the New York Times video website, and then let it fade into the next segment, which is GWB talking about the economic crisis and thanking his economic advisors for WORKING ON THE WEEKEND as the economy rains down around our heads.


JEK
Obaman(a)ut, believer in better things, under-invested in the Euro

Abuse of Power

My landlady, as wise and even-headed a landlady as has ever been a stalwart member of the Clinton camp, forwarded me this excellent article about the Samantha Power incident. Which incident, Ian Williams says and I agree, should never once have happened.

Isn't it great how, as in the case of Power v. Peev, allegory can exist even in real life?

And, of course, the epigraph is priceless:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God, the British Journalist,
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.


JEK
Used to read his quotes back to his interview subjects when he was a reporter, until he got better at writing both quickly and legibly (which latter skill he's since abandoned in the tradition of physicians.)

Stern bears.

Here's what I know about investment banking:

- It's where all the jocks, insufferably congenial posers, and too-smart-by-half people from high school went to work.

- Putting jocks and insufferably congenial people in charge of large sectors of unregulated Economy has never seemed like a good idea to me.

- The poor ideation of the above has nothing on the not-a-good-ideaness of giving over the reins of modern capitalism to the same people who, when last we saw them, were explaining how they were just days away from convincing the federal government to send them the 40 acres + mule to which they were statutorily entitled. You know who you are, Hank.

What would happen if you did this? Well, I'm no economist. But I definitely did go to high school, and it seems like you'd get a lot of alpha males competing with each other to bring about the biggest deal involving the greatest number of other alpha males met at cocaine fueled parties, and you'd make that deal involve complex, unproved derivative instruments that are dependent on every American buying three homes and paying them off at 11% interest.

And then you'd get this.

The part of the story I love best is that the deal, which discounts BS's stock price from $30 to $2, includes the skyscraper that Bear Stearns is housed in. Which is certainly worth more than the purchase price. So Bear, the Great Bull's hit bottom.

-JEK
Ran his college newspaper and kept it very much in the black; sometimes thinks he should have been a management consultant, but less so now; triple varsity PE, favorite moment of any party is discovery of an uninhabited corner, raised to believe he owes the government at least 1/3 of any mule he ever owns.

Rapscallionism

So David Brooks is the acknowledged queen of iffy social generalizations.  However, there may be something in what he says here.  Politics (like any job that entails being surrounded by people who tell you how great you are all day) does seem to have a corrosive effect on the psyche, and that may have something to do with les affaires Spitzer, Craig, etc.  

Then again, there's a huge selection bias operating here.  Plenty of nautical engineers go to prostitutes or cheat on their wives, but we don't hear about it unless we're immediately involved. Maybe Pols (like Stars) are Just Like Us after all.

DMW

(non-Pol, non-Star)

MADE OF SKIN

So, it's not necessarily the case that ALL the authors and readers of this blog are Obamanauts (although, I guess, both posters so far are).  We understand that some people like different stuff, like maybe having a bunch of consecutive president names that repeat to make life mnemonically easier on future fourth-graders, and we're at peace with that.  As another example of our open-mindedness, I personally am aware that not everyone will find this dinosaur comic as stomach-unstaplingly hilarious as I do.  But I think that might be because not everyone is imagining the dinosaurs with Canadian accents.

DMW

(Dinophile, Obamaphile, Possible Canadian Sympathizer)

Proportional Response

The newest game among the campaigns, as we trudge dutifully off to Pennsylvania, is sniping off advisers and surrogates. Stephanie Power went, victim of jet lag, an abundance of honesty, and a reporter who had a funny sense of ground rules; then Geraldine Ferraro was hauled off the national stage, a bit too late for her own good. One all.

The laser sites and hollow points now seem aimed at Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor. He said some things that weren't very nice about America. And I think a week ago we would have seen Obama running scared at this...denouncing his church, joining some nice white denomination on the North Side of Chicago, perhaps, and certainly running away from this as fast as he could. But in a sign that maybe a little bit of sanity has started to prevail here, he is instead just saying this (via the Huffington Post): just because a guy is my minister doesn't mean I always agree with him. And besides, he's not my minister anymore. Done.

An additional plus: another chance to reinforce his Christianity, to those to whom it matters.

JEK
Can you be a lapsed Unitarian if you never really started; If he was held responsible for the things his close friends and relations said and did he would be writing this from prison.

My VP Pick

On the basis of this quip alone, this man has my vote for any office he ever cares to run for.

JEK
Sucker for a good line.

Electability

So here's what I don't quite get: the Clinton camp is making a lot of arguments about how Obama's wins in small states don't count for anything. They say that the only way for a candidate to prevail in the General Election is to take the big states in the primaries: California, Ohio, Pennsylvania (and, on and off, Michigan and Florida.)

But, like, that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. In social science terms, it's what we'd call a content validity issue -- you're measuring apples against oranges. In the primaries, you've got the question of which democrat the voters prefer. And in the general election, you're measuring something totally different -- the relative frequency with which Democrats and Republicans go to the polls, and how the independents break.

So let's look at the big states that Clinton "won." First of all, this idea of winning or losing a primary is an arbitrary measure...these contests are designed to award delegates proportionally, and as we've seen, the person winning the majority of the popular vote rarely wins many more delegates than the person coming in second (in the case of Nevada, of course, Obama lost the popular vote but took the delegate majority.) And, importantly, "winning" in most of the big states has meant winning by a small majority indeed -- Clinton's wins have all been pretty close. So I think all this talk about winning and losing misses the point. For the purposes of selecting the democratic nominee, it's all about the delegates -- super and not-so. And extrapolating wins in the primary to wins in the general election just doesn't make any sense. Both of these candidates have won big in states that they could never expect to take in a general election.

What really needs to be measured, to get some sense of how the democrats might fare against McCain, is turnout. And there, they both seem to have a lot of strength. But they seem to be strong for similar reasons, since most of these people who are turning out in this election say they'd vote for either one of the candidates (less so since the Kitchen Sink method went into effect on Clinton's side.) Democrats are excited about this race, and even in the states where he lost by a relatively large margin, Obama could expect to find a huge amount of democratic support (in most of these places, remember, he got close in the polls despite having almost all of the local democratic power base supporting his rival.)

What you really need is to look at how the candidates would independently fair, state by state, against McCain. And lo, thanks to the internet, that has been done! You'll have to scroll down a bit, but you can see that in an electoral matchup, both win pretty easily. And this poll doesn't take into account likely turnout -- likely to swing democrat -- or the solidifying of the party behind a single nominee -- which, hopefully, will happen.

This election is the Democrats' to lose, in other words. And while they seem anxious to try, I'm not sure they'll manage to screw this up enough to be in real trouble. So I'm not paying any attention to the "electability" question in its current format. What I do love, though, is the way that Obama wins differently from Hillary on those maps -- with a bunch of states that I haven't seen blue in a long, long time. And I think that speaks volumes.


- JEK
Obama spoke at his med school graduation to keep a promise made when he was not a famous man, and won his heart when he picked up a hat that fell off his classmate; nominally a Democrat himself for purposes of voting in the Massachusetts primary, but with a real independent streak; not a professional pollster.

The Lighter Side

I'm in medicine. Which makes it hard to watch on TV. Most shows get it all wrong. But some shows get those shows right, and this is one of them:




-JEK
Surgical resident; often thinks maybe he should have gone to film school; likes to think he would make something of this caliber if he had a weekend free

[Insert Name Here] Resigns Following Sex Scandal

So, I don't know anything about New York politics, but this whole Spitzer thing just seems sad, and sort of uncontroversial...man places self on pedestal, falls off, others on pedestals who wish their pedestals were higher laugh at falling man, build higher themselves, hire hookers, process repeats.

One of these days someone is going to propose that all men holding positions of power and between the ages of 45 and 60 be chemically castrated for the duration of their terms. It would save a lot of newsprint.

-JEK
Manhattan gives him mood swings; strict monogamist

Hello. We're Nation Indivisible.

Welcome to Nation Indivisible.

We started this little venture in our heads on November 3, 2004, when we woke up to find George Bush with a legitimate claim to the White House and our hopes for a new beginning lost to the stage fright that seems to grip Ohio whenever the eyes of the world turn her way.

But depression is no mood to start a blog in. That’s partly because it rarely leads to anything worth reading, but mostly it’s because, at least for us, the feeling that your nation is falling apart and there is nothing you can do about it leads to writers block. In our case: really bad writers block.

Flash forward four years. Lots of life changes: new degrees, new lives on new coasts, and new reasons to be a little more optimistic about the future of the world. But still there is a sense that our nation is fractured, and that established interests work for their own self-interest to keep us so. Still it seems as though we are red states and blue states, fighting against one another, fighting with one another, fighting others who challenge our right to fight on our own terms…always with the fighting. And still, getting thoughts written down is not so easy.

And then, one day in January, this appeared.



And suddenly it seemed like maybe there was a path towards an Undivided Nation. Not just that there was suddenly a politician who was willing to say all the things that we’d believed in, quietly, all these years, but that people were responding to that message, believing in that possibility, and choosing hope over fear, collectively, for the first time since September 2001. And it felt so good.

So here’s our blog. Who are we? We’re a bunch of friends, from all over. We don’t share a common political identity. We don’t have a single religious view. We don’t, generally, work in journalism or politics, but we do think about those things a lot, read widely, and enjoy writing.

These are some promises we are going to try to keep:

A: We will not be boring.

B: We will post frequently.

C: We will respond to comments, using your replies to our posts as a way to frame a conversation between you, us, and the rest of the readership.

D: We will not allow the comments section to be an endless series of non-sequiturs, and in this we will triumph over the vast majority of mainstream media.

E: We do not believe in an unbiased press. What we write will be completely biased by our own experience and beliefs. We’ll try to justify those beliefs, through the magic of hyperlinks, but we will never apologize for them. In fact, we will sign each post with a proclamation of our bias, and you can judge for yourself whether we merit listening to or not.

F: We will do out best to earn your readership. You, in turn, should tell us how we could do this better. You will also tell your friends, if you happen to like us.

Welcome.

JEK, Editor-in-Chief

Huge Obama supporter, New Englander, former reporter, current surgeon, prone to complex sentence structures