Race Based Politics

You many think the primaries are over, but likely not, if you've been reading DCW. Yesterday's most interesting House primary took place in the 9th Congressional district in Tennessee, the seat held until two years ago by Harold Ford, Jr. Prior to his decade-long tenure, this Memphis seat was held by his father, Harold Ford, Sr., for 22 years. This is a story of race and gender.

The incumbent is Steve Cohen, a Democrat with a liberal voting record. His challenger was Nikki Tinker, a local businesswoman. She was supported by Emily's List, which only supports female candidates, EVEN against male candidates who share the issues position of Emily's List. Her goal was to paint Cohen as racist, and as a Jew who hates Christians. On Election Day, she was denounced by Barack Obama, who said:

“These incendiary and personal attacks have no place in our politics and will do nothing to help the good people of Tennessee.”

Luckily, the citizenry didn't fall for it. With 89% reporting, Cohen was leading 79%-19%.

Voter Registration

I am proud to announce that I finally live in the BLUE state of Pennsylvania. Democrats now comprise 50.7% of registered voters. (Check the graphic with the article.) Republicans are down to 38%.

And Pennsylvania is not the only state to be affected by a change in registrations: Democratic registration grew in 6 battleground states. In addition, only Louisiana had a rise of over 1% in Republican registration. This can likely be attributed to the fact that the people moving back since Katrina are less likely to be the "Democratic Base" whose neighborhoods were washed away. In Arizona, North Carolina and Colorado, independents are now a firm third of the electorate.

While this doesn't necessarily have a direct correlation to how people will vote in November, the implications (if they hold) are huge for feeder lanes. That is, generally to run for national office, one needs to first hold local office. More registered Democrats mean more Democratic town council members, mayors, County Commissioners, and state reps. All eventually feeding up to national office.

Summer Vacation

For a lot of people, it's a good time to take a break. It's been a long year.

One group not going on vacation is that group of Americans earning less than $27,000/year. They're not going because, face it, they can't afford it. 1,350 of them were recently polled, by land line AND cell phone, and split 47 - 37 for Obama. This demographic group makes up 25% of adult Americans. While there was a split amoung whites (and a lot of undecideds), it was different for blacks and Hispanics:

"Among the African Americans polled, 92 percent chose Obama as the candidate more concerned with their problems; not a single black respondent said so about McCain, although 1 percent said "both do." Hispanics also sided with Obama on that question, favoring him by more than 40 percentage points as the more empathetic candidate."

One group that now is on vacation is the US Congress. Well, to be honest, not ALL of them have left. Some of the House Republicans are still there, railing at the wind to get Congress back in session to vote on off-shore drilling. High unemployment, high gas prices, lack of health care, lack of jobs, and instead of being back in their districts talking to voters about solutions, they're grasping at straws:

"Rep. Donald A. Manzullo (R-Ill.), one of the stars of Friday’s session, launched into a long soliloquy on John Quincy Adams, likening his fight against slavery to the controversy over an offshore drilling vote. In an interview afterwards, Manzullo referred to the Middle Ages and the rise of the West as justification for a floor vote on offshore drilling."

They're not planning on leaving soon.

Also not-on-vacation is Hillary Clinton, who will be campaigning for Barack Obama this Friday in Nevada.

Trying to do his job was reporter Stephen Price of the Tallahassee Democrat. (It's the paper, not the party.) He was at a Florida McCain event, and was ousted by McCain security. Oddly, he was the only African-American at the rally. The campaign told him he had to leave because he was in the area reserved for national reporters, and he is a state reporter. There were no national reporters there. HHHMMM

Also still working is Dick Wadhams:

"Long-suffering Colorado Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer suffered another setback Saturday when his campaign manager Dick Wadhams – who earned national fame for guiding former Senator George Allen from a presidential frontrunner to a national laughingstock – suffered his own “macaca meltdown,” telling Lynn Bartels of the Rocky Mountain News, “We're going to shove a bunch of 30-second ads up his a** on this issue over the course of the campaign.” Wadhams’ bizarre, vulgar outburst came in response to Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall voting against a Congressional adjournment – as he had pledged to do, and, oddly, how Schaffer himself had urged. There was no immediate response from the many conservative organizations with ties to Schaffer who have long decried a breakdown in the country’s morality."

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Wal-Mart and Vote Corecion

Wal-Mart has decided that their people need to vote Republican. They have organized mandatory meetings, and not surprisingly may be breaking the law by including hourly employees in these meetings.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.

Obama Stood UP!

Yesterday morning dawned gray and cold. Weather far too raw for what should ostensibly be spring. Hunkered down in my office in layers of clothes, door mostly shut to let the space heater do its optimal job, blinds closed to avoid the wind-whipped trees. Precision point concentration on Power Points.

I had a 2:30 conference call, and about 10 minutes before that, I decided to take a break and check the news for the first time since about 6 in the morning. Drudge had it, and then MSNBC, the text being blogged out live as it happened. I looked to the blinds to my left and realized that the sun was somehow magically shining bright. Like it should. Obama was divorcing Wright at that very minute.
I read the words, and later watched the speech. Often with Obama, the words themselves carry power. Perfect articulations of nuanced thought. This was not that, not at all. He was so very angry that he spoke quietly, haltingly, the specific words in this case secondary to the emotion.
While some will doubtless contend that this was political posturing, and too little, too late, I think not.

We all know people who have divorced after 20 years -- after having built together a life of children, property, shared decisions and memories. They say “I don’t know what happened to that person I married.” The pain is palpable.

Divorced or not, each of us knows what it is to be terribly, irrevocably angered, hurt, disappointed and sometimes even blindsided, by someone we love. If you don’t know this feeling, just wait, it will happen. Often it is actually revocable, but not always. The pain is unbearable.
Obama stood up and said enough is enough.

And in other news:

• 
  Governor Easley of North Carolina, in endorsing Hillary Clinton, said she was so tough she “made Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.” Both gay organizations (who called and complained) and flowers, take offense. But the fun part here is if you can find the video somewhere, check out Hillary’s face as he says it. Priceless…..
• Albert Hofmann died yesterday at the age of 102. You may not know the name, but if you lived through the 60’s, you know his product line.
• From the Correspondent’s Dinner last Saturday night: Dick Cheyney is starting to pack up the Vice Presidents’ residence. “You have no idea,” he said, “how long it takes to dismantle a dungeon.”
• John and Hillary want a summer cut of the gas tax. This is an idiot idea. First, the gas tax is a USE tax. Use taxes are good. In this case, the tax pays for rebuilding roads, and construction workers lose work and jobs with no gas taxes, roads degenerate further, it’s another hit to a struggling economy. Further, it doesn’t make an appreciable difference. Assume you have a 20 gallon tank, and gas is $4.00/gallon. Therefore, a fill-up costs you $80. And yes, that sucks. Cutting the gas tax to zero saves you $3.64 off the $80. P-A-N-D-E-R, P-A-N-D-E-R, P-A-N-D-E-R. And on top of everything else, we need to use less oil, not find encouragement to use more. But to continue the math -- if you REALLY want to save money, do this instead. Car 1 -- 20 mpg, $4/gallon, and you’ll need to spend $80 to go 400 miles. Trade that car in for one that gets 35 mpg, and it will cost you $45.71 to go the same 400 miles. THAT is a significant difference.
  
• McCain is out with a “new” health care plan. He’s talking about putting power “back in the hands of family”. This is as good as his gas tax deal. Under the plan, insurance companies make money, pharmaceutical companies make money, employers no longer need to offer health insurance, and you are screwed. http://mccainsource.com/mccain_fact_check?id=0006
  
• Hillary challenged Obama to a “Lincoln-Douglas-style” debate. On Olbermann last night, they had the photo Fox News used: if any of you have an in over there at Fox, please tell them NOT Frederick Douglas, STEPHEN Douglas. And personally, I think Obama should agree to two REAL Lincoln-Douglas debates. So each could go first. The actual format was that the first person spoke for an hour, the second person spoke for an hour and a half, and the first person had a half hour at the end to follow up. And oh, NO interruptions while the other was speaking. Real different from the Hillary idea of getting up on flat-bed trucks and yelling at one another.
  West Virginia is using the California plan to disenfranchise Independent voters. I don’t know anyone in West Virginia, but if you do, please let them know there’s a problem with the ballots. If you need more specific information, please let me know.

Final note: I inadvertently got something wrong yesterday when I wrote that no one on this list knew what it was to be hungry, unless they were in Europe during WW2. One of the list readers is Bulgarian, and lived there under Communist rule. He has lived through coupons and rationing, and will hopefully be sending me something to post so we can all understand what it’s like. He gently chided me under the “you Americans” catch-all, and he was right. He knows what it is to be a hungry child. Apologies, you DO know.

Pick One

Today's topic is honour. Or lack thereof.

But before we get there -- thanks to all of you who called and wrote with your blood types....

And -- tomorrow is the next stage of the Iowa caucuses -- DCW says that John Edwards may do better than expected.

So now, on to honour, and our first contestant is John McCain.

McCain released his tax returns last week, but I didn't have time to read them. Well, now I've found the time. First, as everyone probably knows, John and Cindy file separately. Therefore, we don't know anything about the $100 MILLION Cindy is sitting on. I can let that pass. No, I can't: she claimed she kept her numbers quiet "to protect her children's privacy." And then it turns out that the largest part of their joint charitable contributions went to the private schools the McCain children attend.

We're going to skip the stolen recipes Cindy McCain posted as her own on the McCain campaign website (actually courtesy of the Food Network) and move on to John McCain's Disability Pension. I did not make this up.

John received $58,358 from the Navy as a disability pension for injuries sustained in the Vietnam War. This money is 100% tax free because of the 'severity' of the injuries. Data from the McCain Senate staff, reported here.

Now, if he is truly disabled, he deserves the pension. But if he is truly disabled, how does he claim to be in excellent health? In general, one gets a disability pension NOT as an honorarium, but because one is unfit to undertake their job. GOVERNMENT pensions are for people who cannot do ANY job. At least, that's how it works for the SSA pensions. I recently read the rules, and you lose the pension if you can go back to work. There might be something different about military pensions -- but I guess my follow-up question would be: How come John McCain gets one which is triple what SSA pays, and while 25% of the Iraq War vets are homeless? 60 grand is a lot of money when you remember that median income in America is in the 40's depending on whose count you believe -- although they are all in the $40's.

Does anyone else think McCain should pick one? Either -- "My wife is worth $100 million dollars, and I make decent money as a Senator, and therefore I'll return my Social Security pension, and my Navy disability pay, since I don't need it." (You know, like dollar-a-year men, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jon Corzine). Or perhaps: "I'm qualified to be Commander in Chief because I'm in great shape, and therefore, I don't need a disability pension."

I could overlook it all if McCain was not opposed to increasing the GI Bill for current vets, and in favour of waterboarding. (Yes, I have the source: look at his vote list from the current Congress).

Our second contestant is Hillary Clinton.

Today, in North Carolina, the State GOP is going to start running Jesse Helms-style TV ads. (If you don't know who Jesse Helms was, look at the pictures in the dictionary next to the word "racist"). Source: North Carolina state GOP http://www.ncgop.org/home/index.asp (It's the story called "Extreme").

They are running the ad for downticket pull -- and they have a long history of ugliness like this. Here is the 1990 Jesse Helms ad: http://www.pbs.org/30secondcandidate/timeline/years/1990.html

And I understand this -- fear sells, and this is hardball politics.

BUT -- people of conscience need to condemn things like this. Which John McCain did. The Clinton camp was asked to do so also, and they have remained uncharacteristically silent. The Big Tent -- the Democratic Party -- we do NOT condone this sort of ugliness. Wait, I’m sorry, I forgot, the Clinton camp has demoted Mark Penn and is now using the Karl Rove playbook.....sorry, really, I forgot.

And our final contestant today is sort of amorphous. Back in 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed. (For details, Google “1993 WTC bombing" and then skip Wikipedia because it is NOT a real source). Back in 1993, I spent a fair amount of time listening to people say that if the Clinton administration did nothing, this would happen again. They said that this was just the start, that the Arab extremists were coming for America and we needed to prepare. NO ONE listened.

We'll come back to this, but first, a little semantic sideline: when I was in practice, I had a patient who had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, BAD cardiac arteries, and a few other things. I told him that he needed to cut back on the 2 packs a day he was smoking, cut out the after-dinner stogie, quit drinking, and modify the diet he was on, which consisted of meat, pasta, wine, coffee, and not much else. He refused things like fruit and veggies, with the exception of tomato gravy. He told me that life wouldn't be worth living without all that stuff. I sat by his hospital bed the night he died. My semantic question: is it his fault that he died of a heart attack? Should he be blamed? I don't have an answer although I believe we make the choices we make, and we pay the consequences. But there are some who would say it was his fault.

Back to the WTC. The alarmists were right. Arab extremists (the same Kuwaitis and Saudis and NOT the Iraqis) came back in 2001 and killed 3,000 Americans. Is this the fault of the American government? Should they be blamed? If you think the government is culpable, then PLEASE quit blaming Jeremiah Wright for saying that 9/11 was the fault of the government, that they brought this upon us. You can keep at him for the "G-ddamn America" comment, but let this one go.

And before we leave the religious zealots: Hagee, Hagee, Hagee. He has called Catholicism "the great whore", he has said Katrina was because of a gay pride parade, has choice comments on women (sample, "What's the difference between a snarling Doberman and a woman with PMS? Lipstick")

and is an all-around bigot. I don't blame McCain for soliciting Hagee's endorsement, but why does anyone put up with thinking what Hagee says is okay? Gotta ask -- is it because John Hagee is white, and white racism is okay, while anything from a black is anti-American? Does the MSM ignore him because it is not divisive ENOUGH?

Metrics, Numbers, Lies --oops-- I mean SPIN

You might have heard yesterday, as everyone was spinning the PA primary, that Hillary Clinton has won more popular votes than any other candidate.
This amuses me in too many ways to list.

If you want to see the report -- it's here http://facts.hillaryhub.com/archive/?id=7265

Now, and I speak as the daughter of a mathematician who taught me all sorts of things you can do with math, let's look at what you have to assume to believe that Hillary Clinton won more popular votes than Barack Obama. It is the ultimate lesson in spin.

First, in reality, Obama is up by about 500,000 votes. That's actual truth. BUT you can play with the numbers to make them come out differently (the master of counts is General Westmoreland with the Vietnam death counts, followed by most governments in how they explain spending.)

To get things to look like Hillary won the popular vote, you first count Florida, which is somewhat legitimate, except for the people who did NOT vote since it was billed as a beauty contest, so the results are suspect. Still, they ARE results, and this would cut Obama's lead by about 200,000. Then, you need to count Michigan and make the assumption that NOT ONE HUMAN BEING in the state of Michigan voted for Barack Obama. That way, you can include all the votes Hillary won under her name (left on the ballot after signing a pledge that the primary wouldn't count, and saying she WOULD pull her name). You must assume that NOT ONE person voting "uncommitted" was in favour of Barack.

Then, you pull all the caucus votes. A little civics here --> most caucus results do not include the actual popular vote. So, when 150 people, or 1,000 people, vote in a precinct, the vote is "ONE" for the precinct. It's not that hard to make a range guess at the attendance, since there are sign-in sheets, but that data doesn't get released. Still, for the Clinton count to work, you need to discount the "ONE" counts.

Therefore, if you cut out a bunch of states, Hillary does win the popular vote.

In the light of day, though, it's no more than spin.

Next -- prior to the PA primary, the line was that Hillary needed a double digit win in PA to stay in the race. She didn't get that because 9.38% does NOT round to 10. If you think it does, you failed math in grade school. The pundits did not fail math in grade school, Chuck Todd certainly didn't fail math in grade school -- but it is to the benefit of the news media that the internecine fight marches forward.

I'm going to skip the description of how Hillary won PA, unless people ask me to explain it. It primarily comes down to demographics (mostly age). What I want you to know is that despite the poll numbers which say that Hillary supporters will stay home in November if Obama gets the nomination -- it just isn't true. I myself have days when I say to myself that I will stay home in November if Hillary steals the nomination (which is all that is left since the process depends on DELEGATE counts, and she cannot win that) -- but I **AM** a structural Democrat. Hillary's base is comprised of structural Democrats -- old people voting Democratic their WHOLE lives, party regulars who work the polls and the elections, people who vote Democratic out of muscle memory. We're not staying home. None of us.

But you know who WILL stay home? The people for whom this is their first election. VASTLY underrepresented in polls since they have cell phones and no land lines, and because the call lists for pollsters and the Parties are a year behind, they won't vote in November if they feel that the nomination was stolen from their candidate.