Trusted truths

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.

Psalm 146, a chorister’s favourite (it has just ten verses — and that could be one of few verifiable truths in this post).

And so, by a natural progression, to Anthony Wells at ukpollingreport.co.uk.

Wells had spotted an oddity in the ICM/Guardian poll:

More unexpectedly the ICM poll also found a jump in support for the BNP, up to 4%, the highest any poll has had then at for years. This is strange. The BNP have certainly not had any great publicity boost, at the local elections they seemed essentially moribund. It may just be an odd sample, or perhaps as Tom Clark suggests it is just a case of confusion amongst respondents, with some people getting the names of the BNP and UKIP mixed up.

ICM also asked about voting intention in an EU referendum, finding voting intention fairly evenly balanced – 40% would vote to stay in (22% definitely, 18% probably), 43% would vote to leave (32% definitely, 11% probably).

UPDATE: ICM tabs are up here. Topline figures without reallocation of don’t knows would have been CON 27%, LAB 35%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 19%, BNP 5%.

That strange boost of support for the BNP is almost wholly amongst women, almost wholly amongst C2s, almost wholly amongst over 65s and almost wholly in Wales. The unweighted number of 2010 BNP voters in the sample was 1, increased to 18 by weighting. What that strongly suggests to me is that there was one little old C2 BNP-voting Welsh lady who got a very high weighting factor, and probably makes up almost all of that 4%! Such things happen sometimes, but it means the BNP blip is probably just a data artifact that can be ignored.

A euphemism newly minted

Now, there’s a nice one: “just a data artifact”. Try typing that, and most spell-check utilities flag up an error. That’s because the preferred version is subtly different, another form of “truth”.

It’s also a prime example of word-drift. Once upon a  time there was:

artefact: An object made or modified by human workmanship, as opposed to one formed by natural processes.

At some point the alternative spelling seemed to be the norm for an alternative signification:

artifact: Science. A spurious result, effect, or finding in a scientific experiment or investigation, esp. one created by the experimental technique or procedure itself. Also as a mass noun: such effects collectively.

As a point of fact, Mr Chairman, the entire public opinion polling business is based on such “data artifacts”. Notice, even in what Wells says there, how an eight-point Labour lead (35-27) is manipulated down to just six points (34-28) for a headline figure.

Today there are two types of truth …

That’s the start of page 40 of the current Private Eye (#1340, 17th-30th May, so verifiable, if not a “truth”). It becomes an exposé of a criminal Yorkshire property developer who is running the usual rings around the Serious Fraud Office, but begins with a telling generalisation:

Today there are two types of truth. Electronic truth — provided via the ever expanding knowledge universes of the internet. And historic truth — provided by those facts not yet or no longer recorded on easily searchable internet databases.

An American truth

There is a poem by the American romantic, Professor John Russell Lowell, which Malcolm has always assumed to be essentially anti-slavery and pro-”freedom”. Its best-known snippet is the eighth stanza:

Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

A bit too theist for Malcolm, but he appreciates the sense and sensibility.

[For the record, Lowell was President Chester Arthur's appointee as US Ambassador in London. Here he was a literary lion, running Henry James around the Bloomsbury salons, and becoming Virginia Woolf's god-father.]

Trussed truths

Electronic “truth” contains too many “data artifacts” for comfort. Pseudo-statistics (those perpetrated by serial-offending politicians as much as by their natural allies, the opinion-pollsters) are just one source of this creeping corruption.

Psalm 146, of course, prefers the eternal (and unprovable, and frequently controvertible) truths:

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God:
Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is: which keepeth truth for ever:
Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners:
The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous:
The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow: but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.

Therein you may find your “truth”. If so, it is where you find all you need to know about:

• how Huhne was released after 62 days of an eight-month incarceration (and there are still many of us wondering why Vicky had to go down, too),
• why Tory policy on immigration is misguided (thank you, Gordon, we knew you still had decency in you),
• why Iain Duncan Smith needs to review his unChristian welfare policies,
• why ATOS are malevolent rascals,
• indeed, all about life, the universe and everything. Though that “electronic truth” comes close to the mark:

Aagh! The Daily Mail may have good reason!

When Malcolm was going Song for song yesterday, he was missing the Big Event.

Whisper it very low: Ding Dong the Witch is Dead is, after all, foul deep-Pinko agitprop:

Dorian Lynskey has the full filth in today’s Guardian supplement:

I’ve become annoyed by the liberal fingerwaggers, solemnly telling the people who hated Thatcher the “proper” way to mark her death. She was a deliberately divisive politician who caused a great deal of suffering to sectors of society that she didn’t value and it’s absurd to insist that people should hold their tongues just because she became old and frail. That just isn’t human nature and the charts, at their most interesting, reflect the messy, visceral, impulsive side of human nature.

They are also dictated by something that Thatcher knew and loved: pounds and pence. Tasteless this campaign may be, but it’s freedom, democracy and market forces in action. Better yet, some of the royalties go to the estate of lyricist EY “Yip” Harburg, the proud leftie (“Yip” was derived from the acronym for the Young People’s Socialist League) who wrote Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? and was driven out of Hollywood by the Red Scare blacklist. Ding dong to that.

Harburg was not only the lyricist for the song that epitomises the Great Depression, and for the Oscar-winning songs in Wizard of Oz, he also wrote for Finian’s Rainbow — which, in 1947, was the first time Broadway saw a racially-integrated chorus line. And Harburg smuggled in another bit of subversive socialism:

Let’s reprise that, for the benefit of Gids Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith:

When a rich man doesn’t want to work,
He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant;
But when a poor man doesn’t want to work,
He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger, he’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk.

Inevitably, as a figure on the left (Henry Wallace campaign as the Progressive Party nominee in 1948), Harburg was listed by Red Channels in the great clear-out of politically-unreliable talent during the McCarthyite purges. He was out of Hollywood, but continued to fill jobs for Broadway.

That kind of censorship is just what the Daily Mail would believe in.

“I’m white and proud.”

It’s featured, with good reason, as a Say What? on Doonesbury.

For arrogance and insensitivity, it is quite breath-taking.

It originated in a HuffPo piece:

 Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Friday that he was “absolutely shocked” to hear Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia describe a key piece of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most significant achievements of the civil rights movement, as a “perpetuation of racial entitlement” earlier this week.

“I’m not easily surprised by anything, but that took me to a place I haven’t been in a long time,” Clyburn said of Scalia’s comments, during an interview with HuffPost. “What Justice Scalia said, to me, was, ‘The 15th Amendment of the Constitution ain’t got no concerns for me because I’m white and proud.’”

Now the third most powerful Democrat in the House of Representatives, Clyburn’s work on civil rights issues goes as far back as the age of 12, when he was elected president of his local NAACP youth chapter. He organized civil rights demonstrations in college, and even met his wife in jail after a protest.

Growing up in South Carolina, Clyburn said he “grew almost immune” to the racist comments being made around him. He said he will never forget hearing the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) defending his opposition to the 1957 Civil Rights Act by saying, in Clyburn’s paraphrased words, “Our negroes are pleased with their plight.”

To a mere Anglo-Irish West Brit (enough put-downs, already!) such as Malcolm, that needs a bit of teasing out.

Amendment XV of the US Constitution passed Congress (effectively on a partisan vote) on 26th February 1869;  and was finally ratified on 3rd February 1870, when Iowa became the 28th State to accede. Tennessee ratified as late as 8th April 1997. Yes, Indeed.

Like so much of the prose of the Constitution (the Second Amendment, or rather the way it has been tortured to fit notwithstanding), the wording is pellucidly clear:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

And it didn’t work. All it did was oblige States to remove “white” as a condition for the suffrage.

The Supreme Court then made sure it wouldn’t and couldn’t work. In October 1876 the case of United States v. Reece (92 U.S. 214) came before the Court, which declared (with two dissenters):

The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution does not confer the right of suffrage, but it invests citizens of the United States with the right of exemption from discrimination in the exercise of the elective franchise on account of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude, and empowers Congress to enforce that right by “appropriate legislation.”

That was the green light to voter eligibility laws, literacy tests, poll taxes, restricting registration places — when all else failed, sheer intimidation — all to ensure in the Deep South the intention of the Amendment was effectively by-passed.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma: Sunday, 7th March 1965

Selma was the flash-point: about half the population, but just 2% of the electorate were African-Americans. Led by Martin Luther King, SNCC had organised 600 in a planned march from Selma to Montgomery. Reaching the bridge, the march was confronted by armed state troopers. The sheriff warned the marchers they had two minutes to disperse. Even before that limit was reached, the deputies attacked, some on horses, using clubs, tear-gas and canes. Nothing new, perhaps — except for the presence of television, which meant within two days there were sympathy demonstrations in 80 cities across the nation.

Only on the third attempt did King lead a peaceful march.

Out of that came the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has been re-affirmed on four subsequent occasions, the most recent in 2006, when it was approved in the Senate 98-0, and in the House 390-33. Now, cheered on by Republicans and FoxNews, Section 5 is up for grabs and before the Supreme Court.

If Justice Scalia hadn’t sold the pass to Jim Clyburn, then he managed it in the oral arguments on Shelby County v. Holder. Here is David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times:

In court on Wednesday, however, Scalia mocked that vote. He said the Senate’s unanimity simply proved the law had not been given serious consideration. The senators were afraid, he said, to cast a vote against a law with a “wonderful” name. He went on to assert that the reauthorization of the act was merely “a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

That sort of legal reasoning may be good enough for someone sitting on a bar stool well into his third pint, but it is not good enough for the highest court in the land. Scalia makes self-serving assumptions about what was on the minds of senators in 2006 — afraid, not serious, enamored with a name — with no facts to back up his barbs.

Tossing actual statistics back at Scalia, Justice Elena Kagan cited a string of continued voting-rights violations. As to the state of mind of the senators, she said the unanimous vote was pretty good proof that the evidence of contemporary abuses was convincing, even to conservative Southerners.

“It was clear to 98 senators, including every senator from a covered state, who decided that there was a continuing need for this piece of legislation,” Kagan said.

Undeterred, Scalia opined that a law governing voting rights is “not the kind of question you can leave to Congress.” Oh, really? The right to vote is the core of our constitutional democracy. It is not, as Scalia says, “a racial entitlement,” it is an American entitlement. It seems that might be a very useful thing for Congress to watch over and protect. It was eminently important in 1965 and remains important today.

Scrapbook (1) — file under politics

This, and the next, post is Malcolm in full-on Autolycus mode, snapping up whatever ill-considered trifles others discard or mislay.

First, then, John Harris in The Guardian, with the Tory Party Losing the plot. At least that was the newsprint title: on-line it’s:

Can David Cameron see off the Tory troublemakers?

The same-sex marriage bill has opened up deep rifts between the different factions within the Tory party. So how do insiders view the crisis that threatens to engulf David Cameron?

A bit Rentoul, Questions To Which The Answer Is No, there, Malcolm feels. Still, the essay included three of those political quotations that Malcolm cherishes:

“Pretty Fanny”

…  until the arrival of Thatcher, the Tories were a party of power: pragmatic, flexible, supremely confident – and rarely moved to the extent of passion by much more than vague patriotism and a sense of their own importance … The party-at-large was more of a giant social club than a political organisation, and the people at the top often cleaved to the mindset beautifully captured by Arthur Balfour, the Tory prime minister between 1902 and 1905: “Nothing matters very much, and most things don’t matter at all.”

At a quick guess, Harris purloined that from Geoffrey Wheatcroft, whose The Strange Death of Tory England gets mentioned elsewhere in the article. Quite why that one, of so many Balfour gems, is the most cited may be explained in that it so perfectly matches the laid-back ennui that, unfairly, typifies Edwardian England between the Boer and the Great Wars.

Dirty Dick

Harris follows that, in the very next paragraph with:

For most of the past century, it was Labour that was most often distracted by internal strife, something that prompted the senior party figure and political diarist Richard Crossman to bemoan the different ways that each of the titans of British politics responded to political difficulties. “When the Tories are in trouble,” he wrote in 1956, “they bunch together and cogger up. When we get into trouble, we start blaming each other and rushing to the press to tell them all the terrible things that somebody else has done.”

Malcolm has the faintest suspicion that Harris is inverting Andrew Marr’s 1999 article for the New Statesman, Fear and Loathing on the Left, which is where one can also find that tit-bit from Crossman’s back-bench diaries.

That one catches Malcolm’s attention, not just because of the palpable truth and bitterness it contains, but specifically with the word “cogger”. One feels it implies all false mateyness and chaps-together, a variant of “codger” — as Dickens has it:

‘You have been drinking,’ said Ralph, ‘and have not yet slept yourself sober.’

‘I haven’t been drinking YOUR health, my codger,’ replied Mr Squeers; ‘so you have nothing to do with that.’

Ralph suppressed the indignation which the schoolmaster’s altered and insolent manner awakened, and asked again why he had not sent to him. [Nicholas Nickleby]

Or it’s a bit of that school slang (Crossman was Head Boy at Winchester, and didn’t it show)  that sticks to us through life. “Cogger” is a double-edged weapon, and typically so in Crossman’s fine Italian hand. In seventeenth-century cant, it was one who cheats at dice. Later, in Ainsworth’s Latin dictionary of 1783 it was the translation for:

Palpator, a flatterer, coger, cajoler, sycophant, glozer.

Hey! Hey! LBJ!

Harris inevitably reaches the thorny topic of ConHome:

… the website-cum-movement whose figurehead is Tim Montgomerie, the man who briefly served under Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership as his chief of staff, before going on to position himself as the voice of Tory activists. It may be some measure of the febrile state of Tory politics that Montgomerie is one of the most influential Conservative voices, who torments the leadership on a regular basis. Yesterday, he was orating from the pages of the Times, arguing that the Tories were in a ”fundamentally unhealthy” state, that Cameron’s modernisation project “has been conducted casually”, and that the prime minister’s political machine “has the attention span of a goldfish”.

There are only three good reasons (and they are good) for reading ConHome: Montgomerie, Paul Goodman (the ex-MP for Wycombe) and the spectacle of Tories making fools of themselves.

Harris continues:

Montgomerie is also a high-profile supporter of Johnson, whose most notable contributions to last year’s Tory party conference were a frenzied “Boris rally”, and a new website that crystallised his view of the correct Tory path, with its url reminiscent of the political satire The Thick of It: strongandcompassionate.com. What Cameron thinks of Montgomerie is not a matter of record, though his constant manoeuvrings may bring to mind what Lyndon B Johnson famously said of advisers to President Kennedy: “They may be just as intelligent as you say. But I’d feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff.“

Possible error there: that one is more usually accredited to Sam Rayburn, and said to LBJ (though, of course, Johnson was quite capable of recycling it). Rayburn was the Texan Democrat who was the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives. His seventeen years, over three terms, in possession of the Speaker’s gavel (as well as an intimate knowledge of the dirt under the fingernails of Texan politics) gave ample chance for his earthy wisdom to be recorded.

And next, it is hoped, to booky things …

Before I sleep ….zzzzz

Here’s a magnificent pun that Malcolm will treasure:

Meet Ron Johnson, the Randiest of the Ayn Rand Republicans

It’s John Nichols at The Nation, celebrating the Senator from Wisconsin.

Nichols vamps lightly on the propensity of GOP figures for trite “Objectivism”:

Rand’s books serve as an ideological touchstone for a new generation of Republican politicians who have built their politics around the writer’s cold delineation of distinctions between idealized “makers” and disdained “takers.”

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, the party’s 2012 vice-presidential nominee, peppers his remarks with Randian references and once admitted, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann employed the Rand lexicon during her 2012 presidential run. California Congressman John Campbell gives interns copies of Rand’s opus, Atlas Shrugged, whileHouse Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-California, tweets: “Still reading Atlas Shrugged—it’s quite the read.”

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul says he’s really a “Randy”—not a namesake of the author. “But,” he adds, “I am a big fan of Ayn Rand. I’ve read all of her novels.”

Malcolm admits to a total reading block here. He’s tried. He’s failed. Repeatedly. Life is too short for such stuff. He reaches page 10 and the heat death of the universe totally overwhelms him.

Nichols — bless his little cotton socks — deconstructs the effete Senator Ron Johnson, the Tea Party favourite — after Johnson had been cut down to size by Secretary of State (as he now is) John Kerry.

However, Malcolm interposes one small quibble against Nichols, who writes:

While Johnson may not be prepared for Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, he’s entirely up to speed on Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. Never mind that Dorothy Parker said of the book, ”This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Ron Johnson thinks Atlas Shrugged contains 1,168 pages of life lessons.

1,168 pages to grind through! How does anyone manage it? Is life that long, or does it just feel eternal? Meanwhile, Malcolm is currently pecking and picking, yet again, at Tristram Shandy — some 700 pages in this delicious Visual Editions version — and that is something that could, and should go on for ever.

That isn’t Malcolm’s grief over Nichols: it’s that gratuitous involvement of the Dorothy Parker. The oft-quoted, and most often mis-attributed quotation was produced as a review of Benito Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress. That was originally published, in 1909, as a pull-out serial in La Vita Trentina  as Claudia Particella, l’Amante del Cardinale: Grande Romanzo dei Tempi del Cardinale Emanuel Madruzzo.

Nichols’s  punch-line pays for all:

Paul Krugman reminds us, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

Which came originally from a 2009 blog by Kung Fu Monkey.

Ex America semper aliquid novum

Malcolm reckons two elements should inspire a good blog offering:

• Serendipity: Horace Walpole’s invention, for:

The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.

Well, so far, there’s nothing ‘happy’ to be extracted from the Newtown CT massacre.

• Bizarrerie, which Malcolm discussed at some length recently.

Somewhere in there comes this, from the New York Times:

Newtown, incorporated in 1711, takes its child-friendly, Norman Rockwell ambience seriously. The all-purpose landmark is the downtown flagpole, which dates to 1876. Fat and packed with small-town ephemera, including weekly equestrian news, The Newtown Bee dates to 1877. Scrabble was developed in Newtown by a local lawyer, James Brunot, in 1948, who adapted an earlier version and changed its name from “Criss-Cross Words” to “Scrabble.”

That article is topped-and-tailed by references to a local business selling Christmas trees.

Scrabble, Christmas trees … it all seems so reasonable, so normal in an unreasonable, abnormal context. One has to reach to grasp a vestige of sanity.

For the record, it’s about 75 miles — say, around a hundred minutes driving time — from Stockbridge, Massachusetts (the Norman Rockwell home) to Newtown, Connecticut. Malcolm has to wonder what the late-period Rockwell would have drawn this weekend. It would be telling, caring, gentle, and incisive: it would be infused by some of that quiet anger — liberal angst, if one must —  that went into The Problem We All Live With, the painting of six-year-old Ruby Bridges going to school in New Orleans (and which hung for a while outside Obama’s Oval Office).

Or perhaps it would reflect the earlier, Birthday Surprise:

Here’s to those dedicated teachers who gave their all on Friday.

Too early, but rethink necessary

A day on, and we are already getting the post-mortem analyses of what went wrong for the Republican Party. This time it’s serious:

The New England wing of the House GOP, after showing brief signs of life, is extinct again.

Democrats cleaned out the region on Tuesday, knocking off New Hampshire GOP Reps Charlie Bass and Frank Giunta and fending off stiff challenges to Massachusetts Rep. John Tierney and Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline. Republicans also lost a toss-up open seat race in Connecticut.

The GOP didn’t fare much better in New England’s Senate races either. Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown lost his seat, Independent Angus King captured retiring Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe’s seat, and Linda McMahon spent more than $40 million in a losing bid for Connecticut’s open Senate seat. In Vermont, meanwhile, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders demolished his GOP foe in a 71-25 landslide while Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse won 65-35.

The Republicans’ initial base was in the Northeast and the upper Midwest. So one good’un, even this early, is Peter Beinart on The Daily Beast. He is almost certainly wrong to assume (as his headline has it) any New Democratic Dominance in U.S. Politics. Where he is useful is to propose a once-over-lightly historical perspective:

For roughly half a century after the Civil War, Republicans dominated American politics because they dominated the North. But by the 1920s, after almost four decades of Catholic and Jewish immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, the North had changed. And instead of embracing that change, the GOP fought it, spearheading blatantly anti-Catholic measures like Prohibition and shutting down mass immigration in 1921 and 1924. Democrats capitalized, nominating a Catholic, Al Smith, in 1928. Smith lost, but in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt built on the coalition he had forged, and won the presidency by combining the white South—a traditional Democratic stronghold—with the new immigrants of the urban North. Then, to an unprecedented degree, he appointed Jews and Catholics to top administration jobs. In 1935 Time magazine noted the change by featuring two key Roosevelt advisers, the Catholic Thomas Corcoran and the Jewish Benjamin Cohen, on its cover.

But it was only in 1936, when FDR won despite a terrible economy and the venomous opposition of much of the Northern WASP elite from which he hailed, that Republicans began to acknowledge that America had changed—and left them behind. And that’s exactly what Republicans are realizing again Tuesday night. For the last four years, Republicans have argued publicly, as they did between 1932 and 1936, that their defeat was a fluke. They’ve said John McCain was a bad candidate who only lost because Americans were sick of George W. Bush. They’ve said the Tea Party heralded an anti-government shift that would sweep the GOP back into power. They’ve said America was still a center-right country.

By no coincidence, and it’s David Frum repeating it, Romney is being depicted as a “weak candidate”. Equally, loyalists in the Republican Party seem to be denying that anything is “structurally” wrong — cue Charles Krauthammer.

On the contrary, the whole scenery has changed.

• Along with returning Obama, the Great American Public have accepted Obamacare and gifted Obama’s second term with the (surely, inevitable) economic bounce-back.
• Even climate change, the great unspoken of this electoral cycle, is now mainstream (Allen West of Florida is a political corpse).
• Maine and Maryland have voted for same-sex marriage, while Minnesotans voted down a constitutional ban: Washington may yet endorse marriage equality.
• Colorado and Washington have legalised recreational Mary Jane.
• California came within a three-per-cent swing of repealing the death penalty. Back in 1978 they voted 7 to 3 for judicial killings

In so many ways, the United States is adapting to the 21st Century.

The Woman issue

This is the biggie.

• There are now a record number of women in the Senate— though not enough.

Hear it from Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker:

If you got caught up in the “war on women” narrative this election cycle, you might have missed the fact that that a conspicuous number of women were running for the Senate today. There were women candidates in fifteen of the thirty-three Senate races. In three states—California, Hawaii, and New York—both the Republican and the Democrat are women. And a couple of those women check other demographic boxes as well. In Wisconsin, Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, won a tight race against former governor Tommy Thompson. She will be the first openly gay member of the Senate. In six of the contests where women are running, they’re the incumbents, and likely to be reëlected. Among the remaining nine states, there’s Hawaii—which will definitely send a woman to the Senate—Wisconsin; Massachusetts, where Elizabeth Warren defeated Scott Brown tonight; Nebraska, where Republican Deb Fischer seemed to be beating former governor Bob Kerrey; Nevada, where Republican Dean Heller was trying to defend his seat from Shelley Berkley; and North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp and Republican Rick Berg were running neck and neck. Linda McMahon, a Republican, was defeated in Connecticut.

The Show Me State

Republican center must be taking note of what happened — especially in Missouri.

Romney took the State by some eight points (when McCain in 2008 squeaked a lead of just 3,900 votes out of 2.9 million) — yet he had no coat-tails. The Democrat Governor was returned — the first successful re-run since 1996. And Claire McCaskill steam-cleaned Todd “legitimate rape” Akin by a 15½ per cent margin. 400,000 Missouri voters split their tickets: Romney but also McCaskill. As the AP summary of the exit poll had it:

Women didn’t carry McCaskill to victory on their own, but they did the heavy lifting. McCaskill outperformed by a wide margin among women, who supported her in slightly higher numbers than in 2006. The Democrat’s comfortable edge among women was propelled by those 18-44 who overwhelmingly lined up behind the first-term incumbent, as did a significant number of middle-aged women who made up the bulk of female voters. Akin offset some of these losses by holding his ground among women 65 and older and white women overall. Black women, however, backed McCaskill in a landslide.

Aside from being more likely to look past Akin’s comment, men backed Akin in stronger numbers than women, especially those who are older. Still, the best Akin could muster was a split with McCaskill for the entire male vote.

• Women are some 52% of the Missouri electorate.

As one wise comment, while the results were coming in, had it: If you’re a Republican with views on rape and abortion, better to keep them to yourself.

The wit and wisdom of Bill O’Reilly

You don’t expect it on Fox News, but O’Reilly nailed it:

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly said tonight that if President Barack Obama wins re-election, it’s because the demographics of the country have changed and “it’s not a traditional America anymore.”

“The white establishment is now the minority,” O’Reilly said. “And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

“The demographics are changing,” he said. “It’s not a traditional America anymore.”

He could have added the other element: younger voters bothering to use their franchise, which is another change from pre-Obama days. He was mistaken to suggest that “America” has somehow changed: what has changed is that long-suppressed sections of the electorate — women and the ethic communities, the young and the radicals — have mobilised themselves.

Of course, the draught isn’t whistling just one side of the gang-way:

Blue Dog Democrats also saw their numbers shrink from 24 to 15, including six members who retired, sought higher office, or were defeated in primaries earlier this year. Reps. Ben Chandler, Larry Kissell, and Leonard Boswell all lost Tuesday.

The white establishment is now the minority — but they always were.

Now they know it.

The worst storm in New York’s records was caused by …

… going to bed with the wrong people.

You had to assume there’d be nut cases out there to utter this tripe. The dishonour falls to … ta-rah! … Chaplain John McTernan, who apparently operates out of Liverpool, Pennsylvania.

So here’s the divine truth (or one idiot’s version thereof):

On his website Defend Proclaim The Faith, the preacher says the gathering storm must be God’s judgment on gays, and punishing the president Barack Obama for coming out in support of marriage equality.

He believes ever since George Bush Sr signed the Madrid Peace Process to divide the land of Israel in 1991, ‘America has been under God’s judgment since this event.’

McTernan said: ‘Obama is 100% behind the Muslim Brotherhood which has vowed to destroy Israel and take Jerusalem.

‘Both candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda. America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!’

It would be great to have the homosexual agenda fully defined. Perhaps it’s something like: “Oooh, that’s sooo East Coast!” (which Malcolm heard, when standing in a line for the San Francisco cable-car).

Inevitably a bit of mystical numerology has to be involved: it’s twenty-one years since the ‘perfect storm’ of October 1991:

’21 years breaks down to 7 x 3, which is a significant number with God. Three is perfection as the Godhead is three in one while seven is perfection,’ he said.

Surely no arguing with that?

 

Keep your tail up!

Malcolm freely admits his take on US politics is largely that of the East Coast (or what’s left of it, after Sandy came visiting). So David Horsey and the Los Angeles Times may be book-marked, but are not on his regular reading list often enough.

Which is a fault.

So Horsey’s political commentary last weekend only now comes over Malcolm’s horizon. And it is as good a quick-and-easy summary as one could wish:

If you live in Ohio, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are giving you a lot of love. But if you reside in California or Alabama, you may feel neglected and ignored by the candidates for president. Like parents in a big, noisy family, all their attention goes to the troublesome kids, not the compliant, quiet ones.

There has never been much doubt that states such as California, New York, Massachusetts and Washington would give their electoral votes to the president, and no doubt that Romney could depend on states such as Alabama, South Carolina, Texas and South Dakota to be solidly in his camp. All but about 10 states lined up months ago for one candidate or the other. Now it looks as if the number of states still up for grabs has dropped to seven.

As a result, there is really not a national campaign going on. All the effort and money for many weeks has been focused on voters in the swing states. Since, under the U.S. Constitution, the electoral vote, not the popular vote, determines who will sit in the Oval Office, and since the winner in each state takes all of that state’s electoral votes (with Nebraska and Maine being the two outliers where there is a possibility of splitting the vote), a presidential election really amounts to 50 distinct elections. 

He presents us with an unpalatable truth:

With as many as 43 of those 50 elections already decided, the real campaign is happening in just the remaining seven. That means any regional concerns folks in California or Alabama might have can be ignored by the contenders, who do all of their pandering in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Iowa and the few other places that have the potential to pick the winner.

He blames this limited focus on the workings of the electoral college, on polling and on marketing. End of story, except he presents it neatly:

If you are a single female, living in Pasadena, working at a university, driving a Prius, shopping atWhole Foods, watching “The Daily Show,” reading books by Anne Tyler, listening to music by k.d. lang and vacationing in Rome, the Romney campaign does not need to waste time trying to get your vote. If you are a male, living in Tuscaloosa, managing an auto parts store, attending a Foursquare Gospel church twice a week and listening to Toby Keith in your Dodge Ram pickup as you drive into the countryside for a day of deer hunting, the Obama campaign is not likely to spend a cent on you.

All palpably true. Then he dresses it all up in a cartoon pastiche that would fit the New Yorker to a tee:

And very nice too.

Mark meets Jimmy …

There’s a very nice piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker on The Voter-Fraud Myth. Jillian Rayfield fisks it on salon.com.

It is a major article. It won’t convince the neo-Cons, of course.

Then there’s Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury.

The greatest strike against the U.K. press is that, since the demise of the lamentably short-lived The Sunday Correspondent, we benighted Brits have to access the Sunday extended Doonesbury on-line.

Today’s exchange between Mark Slackmeyer and Jimmy Crow is a gem. It says enough of it to get to the caw! of the issue.

By the way: that (as right) is not the punch-line. Which is even more pointed.