Off-Year Election Predictions! The three elections tomorrow that will dominate spin in the press about whether America loves or hates Barack Obama are, of course, VA-GOV, NJ-GOV, and NY-23.

VA-GOV: It seems pretty over for Deeds, and pro-Democrat spinners will be well-advised to focus their attention elsewhere. "You know, Virginia's still in the South" and "Virginia always votes against the White House" are the best Democrats have here, with a big helping of "And Deeds ran a lousy campaign, largely against Obama" for flavor.

NJ-GOV: The polls are close, with the most recent showing a slight edge to Chris Christie, but I really think between Daggett and a superior get-out-the-vote operation Corzine will manage to eke out the win here.

So (if I'm right) that's 1-1, and it all comes down to NY-23. This is a crazy three-way race, with the Republican, Dede Scozzafava, suddenly pulling out over the weekend (though she'll remain on the ballot) and then, even more surprisingly, tossing a strong endorsement behind the Democrat, Bill Owens. The Conservative candidate, Doug Hoffman, has the support of national popular-in-Republican-circles like Sarah Palin behind him, but doesn't actually live in the district or know all that much about it, and will likely be hurt by straight-ticket Republican voting by people who may not have even heard Scozzafava's dropped out.

I won't presume to insult Nate Silver by calling the race when he called it a coin-flip, but I will note that either way the results of this very unusual House race in a small district in upstate New York will likely determine who "wins" the spin war in the national press and thereby determine the tenor of electoral coverage going into 2010—which is as good an indictment of contemporary journalism as any I think you'll see this week.

It will be very interesting, win or lose in NY-23, to see what lessons the GOP takes from the Hoffman ascendancy as we go into 2010 and 2012, and, indeed, what effect running hard to the right will have on their chances if that's how they decide to go. The conventional view is that running away from the center hurts a party's electoral prospects, but I'm not at all convinced the American electorate is quite so rational in its decision-making. It could just be that the pendulum swings back and forth between whatever two parties happen to exist at the moment, regardless of the content of their positions. As I wrote back in May:

More and more I think there's only two possibilities: Either the GOP is in fact in a death spiral and will actually disappear as a national party within the next decade, or the GOP has realized that in a two-party system you don't actually need to say you're sorry; you can just sit back and wait for your opponents to have bad luck, then go crazy once you're back in office. After that incumbency will protect you for a good, long while, and even to the extent it doesn't you can accomplish long-term goals in a very short timespan with party unity, weak opposition, and a compliant, mendacious press.

Jury's still out. NY-23 will be an interesting first data point.

The superb Daily Show segment I was tweeting about last night, about CNN's total refusal to do even basic fact-checking, is now online.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
CNN Leaves It There
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

So rather than pointing out what actually happened -- that right-wing claims about march attendance were false and debunked by news organizations -- they have to pretend that this is, as always, nothing more than an irreconcilable dispute about reality between the Right and the Left, and it's not up to Time to tell their readers what the truth is, because that's not their role, since they're objective and unbiased.

Glenn Greenwald on the 9/12 rally and reality's well-documented liberal bias.

UPDATE: Steve Benen just put up another case study in media "objectivity."

Another Tuesday night linkdump.

* Anthony Karen photographs the KKK for Life Magazine.

* A public records request to the offices of Mark Sanford has revealed actually existing media bias: conservatives outlets promising the governor a safe place to spin his story. Even Colbert got into the act, writing Sanford in character. (Via Steve Benen.)

* Neil sends along this video of four artists painting the same (digital) canvas at once, though both he and I agree it's somehow not quite as cool as it seems like it should be.

* Happy birthday, MetaFilter!

Wednesday night MetaFilterFilter.

* NASA climatologist James Hansen, recently arrested at an anti-mountaintop-mining demonstration in West Virginia, says we're almost too late to stop climate change. I wonder about that "almost."

* Nate Silver considers the legislative strategy at work in the upcoming Waxman-Markey vote.

* Mapping relationships in the X-Men Universe.

* An early Christmas present for my father? Corzine trails badly in New Jersey.

* Lots of talk lately about Robert Charles Wilson's anti-Singulatarian Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century. Here's an interview at io9 that takes up that angle, while Cory Doctorow highlights this blurb:

If Jules Verne had read Karl Marx, then sat down to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he still wouldn't have matched the invention and exuberance of Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock.

* Dancing plagues and mass hysteria. Via MeFi.

* How complexity leads to social collapse: some intriguing historical exploration from Paul Kedrosky. Also via MeFi.

* Roger Ebert explains how Bill O'Reilly works.

O'Reilly represents a worrisome attention shift in the minds of Americans. More and more of us are not interested in substance. The nation has cut back on reading. Most eighth graders can't read a newspaper. A sizable percentage of the population doesn't watch television news at all. They want entertainment, or "news" that is entertainment. Many of us grew up in the world where most people read a daily paper and watched network and local newscasts. "All news" radio stations and TV channels were undreamed-of. News was a destination, not a generic commodity. Journalists, the good ones anyway, had ethical standards.

In those days, if you quoted The New York Times, you were bringing an authority to the table. Now O'Reilly--O'Reilly!--advises viewers to cancel their subscriptions to a paper most of them may not have ever seen. In those days, if the wire services reported something, it probably happened. Today the wire services remain indispensable, but waste resources in producing celebrity info-nuggets that belong in trash magazines. Advertisers now seek readers they once thought of as shoplifters. If nuclear war breaks out, the average citizen of a Western democracy will be better informed about Brittny Spears than the causes of their death.

Discussion (where else?) at MeFi.

Mark Sanford's political career is ending at the press conference going on now. It's painful to watch: after an awkward introduction that sung the praises of the Appalachian Trail, he segued into apologies to (so far) his kids, wife, staff, political supporters, parents-in-law, and the people of South Carolina. He hasn't said yet what he's apologizing for, but it's not looking good.

UPDATE: Yeah, he's been cheating on his wife. But that's the B-story—he ran off for a week without telling anybody on his staff what he was doing or where he was going. He's obviously got to resign the governorship. Hopefully the reporters have the sense to ask the right questions here, not just the salacious ones.

UPDATE 2: So far the reporters have stuck entirely to salacious questions about his marriage and his mistress. Well done, fellows. What about the state responsibilities he shirked? Can we get some real questions here?

UPDATE 3: Okay, finally we're getting some real questions about the fact that he lied to his staff about where he was going. (He admits he did.) And it's at that moment he runs off the podium, to audible questions about whether he will resign.

UPDATE 4: The coverage on MSNBC has been amazingly bad. We've had a parade of Republicans and political analysts with deep solemnity praising Sanford's "honesty" and explaining that no one should try to "make political hay" out of this. (Quoted language was obviously in the distributed talking points.) The man was caught at the airport by a reporter after changing his flight plans to try to avoid the press, after lying to his staff and ditching his official responsibilities for no good reason. To turn this into some morality play is soap opera coverage at its absolute worst. The adultery is irrelevant and the "honesty" a joke. It's about the job he was elected to do.

When will we get a real press corps?

UPDATE 5: According to the Kos thread, even Fox is handling this better:

11:55AM: Fox's Bill Sammon just layed down the law, all but saying Mark Sanford was done. Given Sammon's influence over Fox political coverage, that's pretty much a political death sentence even in the land of wingnuttia.

UPDATE 6: Someone at MSNBC must be watching Fox; Tamron Hall just called bullshit on everything MSNBC broadcast over the last hour and did a great job doing it, explicitly downplaying the soap opera in favor of the job issues in the process.

UPDATE 6: And of course Fox hardly deserves full marks.



Another accident! What are the odds? Curse the luck!

Thursday again! How does this keep happening?

* Today is the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. MetaFilter remembers.

* Planetary #27 finally on its way. October.

* New Hampshire officially passes marriage equality. It looked for a while like nitpicking from the governor's office might actually kill this; very glad it didn't.

* Country first: Lindsey Graham admits he puts the Republican Party before the good of the nation.

* In the wake of Dr. George Tiller's assassination, a frequent Fox News guest has put photos and addresses for the last two late-term abortion providers in the country on the Web.

* Obama speaks in Cairo.

* E.J. Dionne on the corporate media's continued rightward slant. More from Steve Benen.

* The recession: a global view. It's important to remember how good America actually has it—and that the current level of hardship in the States is, relatively speaking, not even all that bad.

* Here comes heath care. Donkeylicious says Team Edwards has something to crow about here. Maybe, but the health-care justification for Edwards's (and later Hillary Clinton's) candidacy long past viability was always weak—the plan you campaign on is never the plan that gets passed.

* And sad news: Bill, killed. Early reports declare David Carradine a suicide.

Has the media feeding frenzy ever destroyed anyone as fast as it destroyed poor Susan Boyle?

Hard times in Republican-town: a new Gallup poll shows steep losses for the GOP across all demographics except conservatives, "frequent churchgoers," and senior citizens. (Via MyDD and TPM.)

More and more I think there's only two possibilities: Either the GOP is in fact in a death spiral and will actually disappear as a national party within the next decade, or the GOP has realized that in a two-party system you don't actually need to say you're sorry; you can just sit back and wait for your opponents to have bad luck, then go crazy once you're back in office. After that incumbency will protect you for a good, long while, and even to the extent it doesn't you can accomplish long-term goals in a very short timespan with party unity, weak opposition, and a compliant, mendacious press.

Misc.

* Batman and D&D alignment. I think "chaotic evil"'s a bit of a stretch. Via Neilalien.

* Lesbians have seized control of the world's supply of poems. It is appropriate to panic.

* Star Trek as liberal fantasy: 1, 2, 3. I'm planning on seeing it tomorrow, I'll have more to say then. (Image via Matt Yglesias.)

* Wire creator David Simon testifies before Congress on the death of newspapers.

UPDATE: The author of the original TNR piece, Jeffrey Rosen, has returned to defend the article blame his editor.

Poor Sonia Sotomayor: she hasn't even been nominated yet and she's already been smeared six ways from Sunday. Glenn Greenwald, as usual, has the definitive must-read take on all this, particularly with regard to the calculated misuse of anonymity to manufacture a impression that, whether false or true, contains none of the factual content required for proper evaluation in the first place.

TPM and Matt Yglesias (1, 2) have been on this too.

I'm 4.6% as terrified since the World Health Organization announced that there are only seven confirmed cases of swine flu fatality in Mexico, not 152. But I'm 2100% more angry at sensationalistic media hype and cynical fear-mongering from people who, by now, should at least be pretending to know better.

The Washington Independent has a great piece on how poorly sourced half-truths and outright lies are laundered through the British press before appearing on Drudge and right-wing cable news programs. Via Attackerman.

Three top blogs—Climate Progress, Glenn Greenwald, and Duke's own American Stranger—separately highlight some inadvertently telling passages in the Newsweek profile on Paul Krugman.

By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking.

In American politics the establishment press is the problem, not the solution, which should mitigate all the late gnashing of teeth over "the death of newspapers." For a lot of reasons, blogs are not the ideal format for public discourse, but they'll have to do; the establishment press has blown the mission beyond all repair. Blogs are all we have left.

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.

Friday night links while I wait for Jaimee to get home so I can watch some science fiction and turn my brain off.

* George Will is in the news this week for his latest stunningly dishonest column on climate change, which the Washington Post has perversely decided to stand behind. The statement from the paper's ombudsman is here.

* The EPA under the Obama administration will finally be able to take carbon seriously.

* Secure website authentification questions.

* Howard Machtinger looks back at his participation in the Weather Underground to acknowledge the group's failures. Via MeFi and Matt Yglesias.

While “New Morning” signaled the WU’s commitment to taking greater care after the accident to target property and not people, it did not acknowledge the WU’s own responsibility for the politics of the Townhouse collective.

WU leaders––then and since––failed to reckon candidly and directly with what it meant, politically and humanly, that core members of the organization had planned to use fragmentation bombs to kill attendees at a dance.

* The complete Pac-Man dossier: everything there is to know about the game, from ghost logic to how to play the kill screen. Via MeFi.

* Hard to believe we've all outlived Late Night with Conan O'Brien. I haven't watched the show in years, but it was formative to my sense of "funny" as a teenager. Here's Colbert saying goodbye the only way he knows how.

* Wither Burris? It doesn't look good for the man nobody wanted to be Senator anyway.

The headline reads, "Climate warming gases rising faster than expected." But what if we expected them to rise faster than expected? By this point, I know I did.

Incidentally, Kevin Drum has the map explaining why it is you're hearing so much about how cold it is this winter.



This map compares global temperatures from January 2009 to the average temperature 1951-1980. And as Drum artfully explains:

As you can see, there are only two areas in the entire world that are colder than the 1951-1980 average: eastern Siberia and the American northeast, home to virtually the entire national press corps. So naturally cold temps are getting lots of media play. But, in fact, the rest of the world continues to be substantially warmer than in the recent past, and if you look at entire latitudes, even in this chilly month every single one is warmer than in the past. It would be nice if global warming really were taking a break, but it's not.

Take one last look at that chart. Those Arctic temperatures are terrifying.

You can generate your own maps using your own criteria and baselines here. For instance, here's the Jan. 2009 vs. 1981-2008 map, which shows that it was also slightly cooler in most of North America, Europe, and some other places than we've become accustomed to.



But look again at the Arctic, especially Greenland. Almost no change in the intensity of the red. That's not a great sign—it suggests to me the feedback loops may be kicking in—though it's just one month and we should reluctant to draw conclusions from it alone.

Finally, here's the last decade of winters vs. the previous fifty (okay, forty-six) years, followed by the last decade (year-round) vs the previous forty-six.





It's generally warmer all the time, but the effect is more pronounced in the winter, especially at the North Pole. We're just lucky most of that ice was already floating...

All is quiet on New Year's Day.

* As the Bush administration blessedly draws to a close, it's important to remember the casualties of the War of Terror, people like Alberto Gonzales. (via)

* More people get their news from the Internet than from newspapers. More importantly:

The percentage of people younger than 30 citing television as a main news source has declined from 68% in September 2007 to 59% currently.

That's good, good news.

* Howard Dean, Vermonter of the Year. Maybe next year, Ben and Jerry.

* Batman casting rumors you can believe in: Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Penguin.

* It's the future, and Microsoft still sucks.

* Top 10 space stories of 2008. A different 10.

* Top 10 cryptozoology stories of 2008.

* James Howard Kunstler's predictions for 2009. Prediction: Pain. Via MetaFilter.

* Thank god for philosophy grad students, the only graduate demographic upon Lit students can look down.

CNN, the Cable News Network, announced yesterday that it will cut its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, including Miles O’Brien, its chief technology and environment correspondent, as well as six executive producers. Ugh. What idiots. It's not as if science, technology, and environmental reporting is likely to be important anytime soon. Via Kevin Drum.

The Onion is on the scene with news of an election upset in the making.


Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

It's funny because it's (still!) true, but it might be more funny if it weren't true...