Internal Monologue

Here's an excerpt from Ferraro's Boston Globe editorial : [Reagan Democrats] don't identify with someone who has gone to Columbia and Harvard Law School and is married to a Princeton-Harvard Law graduate. Yet she expects them to identify with Clinton, someone who went to Yale Law School and is married to a another Yale Law graduate. Oh, and he's also a former two-term President of the United States. That's so much more down to earth. I guess Yale is now the school of regular old workin' class white folk. Who knew. Next time someone accuses me of being a an elitist snob, I'll just say, "No way, dude! I went to Yale! That makes me a regular guy with whom even a Reagan Democrat could identify." Except I probably wouldn't use the "with whom" construction, as it might sound effete. It amazes me how divorced from reality these comparisons about who is "elite" and "out of touch" are. Does Ferraro really think that Rea

More from the same article referred to in my previous post: The reason for the differences is not hard to find. American polling organisations tend to rely on relatively small samples (certainly judged by British standards) for their results, often somewhere between 500 and 700 likely voters, compared to the more usual 1000-2000-plus for British national polls. The recent New York Times poll that gave Obama a 12 per cent lead was based on interviews with just 283 people. For a country the size of the United States, this is the equivalent to stopping a few people at random in the street, or throwing darts at a board. Given that American political life is generally so cut-throat, you might think there was room for a polling organisation that sought a competitive advantage by using the sort of sample sizes that produce relatively accurate results. Why on earth does anyone pay for this rubbish? The answer is that in an election like this one, the polls aren’t there to tell the real story

I like this opinion : The salient fact about this campaign is that demography trumps everything: people have been voting in fixed patterns set by age, race, gender, income and educational level, and the winner in the different contests has been determined by the way these different groups are divided up within and between state boundaries. Anyone who knows how to read the census data (and that includes some of the smart, tech-savvy types around Obama) has had a good idea of how this was going to play from the outset. All the rest is noise. Pretty much everything in the Democratic primary has happened according to expectations. Except for maybe the fact that Clinton is hanging on longer and making dumber arguments than people thought she would. But none of the actual primary results have been that surprising.

For the first time, a poll of Californians shows a majority support gay marriage : For the first time in over three decades of polling on the issue of same-sex marriage laws, The Field Poll finds more California voters approving than disapproving of allowing same-sex couples the right to marry and having regular marriage laws apply to them. In a survey completed May 17-26 among a random sample of 1,052 registered voters the idea of allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry is now approved by a 51% to 42% margin statewide. I think that anti-gay marriage ballot initiative is going to have a hard time. By November, there will a lot of actual marriages. Some of them will include famous people ( Ellen DeGeneres, George Takei ) I think some people who might otherwise vote against gay marriage will think twice about invalidating already existing marriages. That doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it hard, though.

Former Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan (via Glenn Greenwald ): If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. . . . In this case, the "liberal media" didn't live up to its reputation . If it had, the country would have been better served. John Cole : Thanks for speaking up so early , when we could do something about all the lies you witnessed. Dick. I think in order to salvage yourself, you had to bail out of the Bush administration and do your tell-all book long before May 2008. I'm not sure when the cut-off point was. But we're long past it now. You score no points for throwing a deeply unpopular lame duck u

You'd never want to download them in torrent form before they appear in stores June 7th.

Apparently, it matters a great deal whether the proposed California anti gay marriage ballot initiative is an amendment or a revision to the California constitution : [...] California citizens can amend the Constitution by ballot initiative, but they cannot change the fundamental parts of it (such as fundamental rights granted, and fundamental workings of the government) by ballot initiative. Changes of that scale are called revisions , and revisions can only be accomplished by a constitutional convention and popular ratification of the changes made by the convention, or by the Legislature passing the change and submitting it to the electorate for popular ratification. With the CA Supreme Court ruling on May 15th, marriage was reaffirmed as a fundamental right in California, and furthermore, sexual orientation was placed into a protected category, subject to strict scrutiny. Therefore, a ballot initiative cannot take away that fundamental right, because that kind of a change is a re