Monday links, mostly political.

* Thirty years of political misrule have eviscerated the social safety net in this country. These stories from Georgia are unbelievable, and they are not unique.

What Clark didn't know was that Georgia, like many other states, was in the midst of an aggressive push to get thousands of eligible mothers like her off TANF, often by duplicitous means, to use the savings elsewhere in the state budget. Fewer than 2,500 Georgia adults now receive benefits, down from 28,000 in 2004—a 90 percent decline. Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois have each dropped 80 percent of adult recipients since January 2001. Nationally, the number of TANF recipients fell more than 40 percent between then and June 2008, the most recent month for which data are available. In Georgia last year, only 18 percent of children living below 50 percent of the poverty line—that is, on less than $733 a month for a family of three—were receiving TANF.

* British academics telling us what we already know to be true: social problems stem from economic inequality. More at MeFi.

* 3% of DC is HIV positive. I know the disease remains a serious epidemic, especially in poorer communities, but I would have never put the number that high. That's astounding, and horrible.

* The nonreligious are now the third biggest grouping in the US, after Catholics and Baptists, according to the just-released American Religious Identification Survey. According to the article, the molestation scandal has hit the Catholic Church especially hard.

Given his background, I thought this from Sullivan was striking:

It is impossible to know where this is heading, but the latest survey is a reminder to exercise a little scepticism when you hear of America’s religious exceptionalism. Yes, America is far more devout than most of western Europe; but it is not immune to the broader crises facing established religion in the West. The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. In the arguments spawned by the new atheist wave, the Christian respondents have been underwhelming. As one evangelical noted in The Christian Science Monitor last week, “being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence”.

* Language Log on the perverse career incentive not to write. I wonder often whether the blogging I began two years before entering graduate school killed me dead before I started.

* Science and public policy: a lecture on climate change, public misinformation, and actually existing media bias from Stanford's Stephen Schneider. Via MeFi.

The morning news.

* The bailout has cost more than "Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget -- *combined*!" But think of all we have to show for it!

* Related: Alternet's ten worst corporations of 2008. How did they limit themselves to just ten? Via MeFi.

* Marginal Revolution casts some cold water on wind farms, points (where else?) to nuclear energy instead. Isn't the problem here our poor energy infrastructure? The sort of redesigned, rebuilt grid Obama talks about would make these wind farms much more efficient than just about any other source of power, including, I'm given to understand, solar.

* Because of the downturn, colleges aren't hiring. Ugh.

* Cory Doctorow is looking to change the world.



* Confidential to Mac users: an update for Handbrake has been released.

* And Wendy Whitaker is today's poster child for obscenely stringent sex offender laws: because she had oral sex with a 15.9-year-old boy when she was 17, she's a sex offender for life and is currently being forced to vacate her home because it is too close to a church that runs a daycare service. A judge, unbelievably, just upheld this order. Via MeFi.

Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley pulls it out to knock off incumbent Sen. Gordon Smith. With a run-off expected in Georgia, a coin-flip in Alaska, and a recount in the razor-thin Minnesota race, Democrats actually have an outside chance to run the table and get to 60—though that would basically force us to let Lieberman off the hook...

Victory links.

* Headlines.

* How Obama won, including some provocative numbers on the changing demographic face of the United States:

** Obama only won white voters under 29; he did the worst among white voters over the age of 65.

* Obama won among every age group except for voters 65 and over.

Put those together with a 52% margin and you see that post-racial America you keep hearing about is in significant ways a post-Caucasian America.

* How Obama (probably) won North Carolina: volunteers, volunteers, volunteers. Big ups to Durham here. It's good to be back in a blue state.

* Rahm Emanuel may never be Speaker of the House after all—looks like he's taking Chief of Staff.

* Run-off expected in Georgia.

The morning after, landslide. While it looks as Missouri and Montana may have stayed just out of Obama's reach, it looks as though he took North Carolina and Indiana in addition to Virginia, Florida, Ohio, and Colorado in a massive repudiation of the Bush legacy and a huge step forward for this country, on just about every level. (I'll update the prediction thread with our "winner" when things are settled in a few of the still-close states.)

The Senate is a bit closer, mostly because of what some are already calling "the Stevens effect": people say they won't vote for the convicted felon, but they actually will. (Josh Marshall is on a roll with this stuff: he also writes, "Now that Alaska seems on its way of reelecting its convicted felon senator and its (little doubt) soon to be indicted member of the House, I realize that perhaps I judged Sarah Palin too harshly. In the context of Alaska politics, I guess she really is a reformer.")

It's also a little bit unclear what's going on in Georgia, where early votes (still being counted) may yet force a run-off. Oregon and Minnesota are also razor-thin.

Terrible news from the West Coast as Prop 8 looks to be winning. California will be in the courts trying to figure out the status of this year's marriages for a decade, or at least until opposition to marriage equality is finally settled by law or court.

Neo-McCarthyite Michele Bachmann wins re-election in North Carolina, too. [UPDATE: Don't know why I thought she was from NC. Tough luck, Minnesotans.]

Turnout was the highest in generations, 64%, with more people voting for Obama than any other president ever.

Despite my busy schedule, it's been a bit of a slow news day anyway.

* The ATF busted up a mostly aspirational skinhead plot to kill Barack Obama, which included a much more logistically likely subplot to attack a predominantly African-American high school in Tennessee.

* Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has been found guilty on all counts.

* Another day, another bogus Republican vote suppression list thrown out. Today it's Georgia.

* Chuck Todd just told me on the TV that 1/2 the total 2004 turnout in North Carolina has already voted this year.

* The Field notes that Obama has cleared the 50% threshold in states totaling 286 electoral votes.

* And today's moronic right-wing lie: deliberately misquoting an eight-year-old radio interview to give the impression that Comrade Obama supports court-ordered wealth redistribution. (He doesn't. In fact, echoing the right's own talking points, what he actually says in the interview is that sort of social change should not be pursued in the courts.) On this Ambinder makes an interesting point: Republicans have managed to take an election that was clearly a referendum on Bush and turned it into a referendum on the last thirty years of their failed politics. Quite an accomplishment.

"Senator John McCain will not win Georgia," predicts Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party nominee for president. "His shrinking poll numbers are an indication that McCain is losing touch with the American public as we get closer to November 4th."

Landslide watch: InsiderAdvantage puts Obama up by a point in Georgia.

Matt Y. gives us a taste of when we'll know Obama's won this thing.

Virginia and Indiana close at 7PM Eastern, Ohio closes at 7:30PM Eastern (the portions of Indiana in Eastern Time actually close at 6PM) and then Florida closes at 8PM Eastern with the vast majority of the state (the non-panhandle part) closing at 7PM Eastern. In practice, McCain needs to win all four of those states to have a shot at the election, and he’s currently behind in three of them. It’d still take a while before anyone concedes anything, and political junkies will want to see Senate outcomes in Alaska and Oregon, but it’s very possible that the country will basically know the outcome of the presidential election pretty early.

In the worst case scenario that McCain does manage to win all four—and North Carolina, and Missouri, and Georgia and West Virginia, and all the other states that currently look to be in play—it'll then come down to Colorado, where the polls close at 9 PM EST. If Obama wins there and in New Mexico, he still wins, even if he loses everywhere else.

RCP has a six-point Obama advantage in Colorado.

Obama is weighing broadening a map that already appears big and red into four more states. A top adviser, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, said Obama is considering expanding his active campaign back into North Dakota and Georgia, from which he’d shifted resources, and into the Appalachian heartland of West Virginia and Kentucky.

But if that makes you happy, Obama's got just two words for you: New Hampshire.

Debate Day 3. So what are people talking about?

* The head of John McCain's transition team lobbied for Saddam Hussein. Really. Really.

* The Supreme Court has refused to hear the case of Troy Davis, set to be executed in Georgia in the absence of forensic evidence (no weapon, fingerprints, or DNA) and solely on the word of nine witnesses, seven of whom have since recanted their testimony and another of whom is the other primary suspect in the case. More at MeFi.

* Rats-leaving-a-sinking-ship Watch: Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for Bush-Cheney '04, walks away from Team Maverick™.

"They didn't let John McCain pick the person he wanted to pick as VP," Dowd declared during the Time Warner Summit panel. "When Sarah Palin got picked instead of Joe Lieberman, which I fundamentally believed would have given John McCain the best opportunity in this race... as soon as he picked Palin, that whole ready versus not ready argument was not credible."

Saying that Palin was a "net negative" on the ticket, he went on: "[McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot. He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with... He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that."

* The Oliver Stone W film comes out this weekend. Here's an interview from the Times, where Stone doesn't hold back.

Stone has said repeatedly that if Bush had fought on the ground in Vietnam he would never have gone to war against Iraq (he also maintains that if Bush had been president during the Cuban missile crisis, “we would have been in a nuclear war. Definitely. Wiped out. We wouldn’t be here talking.”). So I ask him what he makes of John McCain. After all, the Republican presidential candidate was both a supporter of ousting Saddam and a long-time resident of Vietnam’s “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp.

“I think McCain’s a very special story because he was never a soldier,” Stone says coldly. “He’s said he never saw the results of his own bombing. I saw the damage we did, I saw the corpses, the decay, I smelt the flesh, I saw people who’d been napalmed, people who’d been killed by shrapnel, mutilated. I saw horrible things. McCain was a prisoner and he has a siege mentality. He doesn’t see a balanced portrait of cause and effect – there’s something missing in the man, mentally."

* Nouriel Roubini says the economic hurt has only just begun.

* Biden says we'll win West Virginia. And he has a little bit of fun with it.

According to NBC's Mike Memoli, Biden asked the crowd in St. Clairsville, Ohio, "Which way is West-By-God-Virginia?" He then said, "I want to send a message to West Virginia -- we're going to win in West Virginia! ... We're going to shock the living devil out of y'all!"

* The latest CBS/NY Times poll says we'll win everywhere.

Obama 53 (48)
McCain 39 (45)

* They're still yelling out awful things at McCain/Palin rallies.

* And the Paradise Up North continues to hang with a bad crowd.

Is McCain trying to lose? What other answer can there be to the latest terrible, self-defeating spin on his abominable health care plan? He's actually talking about cutting the Medicare budget. Per Kevin Drum, here's how he got here:

1. We're going to eliminate the tax deduction of healthcare insurance and replace it with a $5,000 tax credit for families.

2. Oops, that means a lot of families will end up paying more in taxes. Can't have that. So what we're really going to do is eliminate the income tax deduction, but not the payroll tax deduction. All better now.

3. Oops again. The new plan saves middle class families from a tax increase, but by doing so it blows a huge hole in the budget. $1.3 trillion over ten years, to be exact.

4. What do do? Cut Medicare! Hooray!

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias have more on this. The latest round of pro-Obama swing state polls don't even take this into effect yet, and they still show Obama leading in Colorado, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and, yes, Florida—what will those polls look like once the slashing-Medicare issue hits the airwaves?

What is his team thinking? FiveThirtyEight is even arguing that Georgia's still in play.

Looks like it's time for Palin's second gaffe. This from ABC News:

EXCLUSIVE: GOV. SARAH PALIN WARNS WAR MAY BE NECESSARY IF RUSSIA INVADES ANOTHER COUNTRY

Buckle your seat belts.

UPDATE: ABC News now has the full exchange.

GIBSON: Would you favor putting Georgia and Ukraine in NATO?

PALIN: Ukraine, definitely, yes. Yes, and Georgia.

GIBSON: Because Putin has said he would not tolerate NATO incursion into the Caucasus.

PALIN: Well, you know, the Rose Revolution, the Orange Revolution, those actions have showed us that those democratic nations, I believe, deserve to be in NATO.

Putin thinks otherwise. Obviously, he thinks otherwise, but...

GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I think that we need to -- especially with new leadership coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO members.

We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today.

GIBSON: And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade.

PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries.

And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.

It doesn't have to lead to war and it doesn't have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that's a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.

UPDATE 2: Matt Yglesias and HuffPo (and HuffPo) take on other aspects of the interview.