Day: November 4, 2009

End of Days

Rick Hertzberg and I agree on three out of four things:

1. The Beck-Limbaugh purification of the Republican Party will continue apace.

Populist nihilism—increasingly the default position within the G.O.P., especially on national level—still has a lot of energy left in it. As the party’s core shrinks (a process that will continue even if its share of the vote increases relative to the Democratic share), the resentful right’s stranglehold will grow stronger.

2. The Republicans will gain seats in next year’s midterm election.

The party holding the White House always loses seats in a new President’s first midterm, the only exception being the special case of 2002, the year of Bush-Rove post-9/11 electoral terrorism.

3. The right, and much of the commentariat, will discover a cause-and-effect relationship between No. 1, above, and No. 2.

They’ll figure it this way: post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Then we diverge. He offers:

4. President Obama will be reëlected.

He’ll be the safe choice. Having been elected on hope, change, and adventure, he’ll be reëlected on reassurance, stability, and … experience.

I think it’s more like:

4. If unemployment is below 10% nationally, Obama may be reelected, depending on opponent. If it’s below 8%, he will win in a landslide regardless of oponent.

It’s really as simple as that.

We’re back in agreement on the bonus Fifth Thing, which is presented more as a prayer:

5. The number of Americans who realize that more of our problems stem from structure (especially the Senate, and most especially the filibuster) than from politicians’ lack of moral fiber will reach the cusp of a tipping point.

Amen.

Perhaps the conventional [remote control] design is finally paying off? Maybe all of those legacy buttons that no one ever uses (the various ‘Picture in Picture’ controls and the colorful A,B,C interactive TV buttons) are part of a deliberate design strategy? Maybe they are there precisely to add to the cognitive load – the accumulated effect being that valuable functions, like fast forwarding, are much harder to learn. Maybe Time Warner’s Remote Control design strategy is finally paying off?

Robert Fabricant likely isolating to 100% efficiency the reason why commercial skipping rates are so oddly low amongst DVR users.

Bad for the Democrat

Alexander Ryking notes something that was seemingly lost amongst the shuffle as the Liberal Media rushed to declare the Democrat dead once and for all:

Bill Owens won NY-23 — beating a right-wing extremist and becoming the first non-right-wing candidate to win the district since 1871. Great job, Michael Steele; you couldn’t even hold a district that has voted for YOUR party for 138 years.

It would seem to me the titanic face-off between the far right and moderate wings of modern conservatism (in the form of the GOP and the Conservative Party vs. the Democrat), with the direct and heavy involvement of Palin and other “rising stars” of the conservative mediasphere that shall go unnamed, that actually has national implications in terms of its outcome (in that Owens now goes to Congress (as opposed to assuming a purely statewide job)), and that ultimately resulted in a historic upending of the normal voting order stretching back more than a century would be the key outcome of what is, even still, a backwater, off-off-year election of little national import. Instead, we get breathless reports on two races for governor with unpopular incumbents, one of whom actively distanced himself from Obama, and, in both cases exit polling definitively showed that this was in no way a referendum on the Democratic Party or Obama in particular:

majorities of voters in both states (56 percent in Virginia and 60 percent in New Jersey) said President Obama was not a factor in their vote today

But, by all means liberal media, don’t let the facts of one genuinely interesting story get in the way of the preferred storyline, whatever its particulars may be. And then wonder at your continued marginalization and failure at connecting with the larger public. For some reason (that is clearly unknowable): people just don’t trust the MSM any more.

Neo-Prohibitionism

Somehow these sorts of observations never come up when, constant as the North Star, MADD is yet again pushing to get the limit down to 0.002  for anyone deigning to utilize a public sidewalk or somesuch:

Detective Spellman, who was given a blood test five and a half hours after the crash, had a blood alcohol level of 0.21 percent, according to the law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified discussing material related to a continuing investigation.

FIVE HOURS! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. How was he able to reach his fucking car!?! But, by all means, let’s have the policy set to jail the soccer mom who had an utterly harmless glass of wine with her dinner.

I have no a priori sympathy for drunk driving/drunk drivers. Far from it. But it is beyond me why we can’t talk about the actual, observed BAC in accidents (and, for that matter, in drivers pulled over for substantive violations and not just the ever-popular “suspicion” canard) vs. where we are setting the standard. Just like with arguments over speed limits, no rationality is allowed in that debate, ever. In fact, it’s the anti-rational arguments that are ceaselessly rewarded and turned into the law of the land. We must solely THINK OF THE CHILDREN! and accept our marching orders; debate ended. Just why is that, and what sort of country does that governance structure create? I’d say California is currently a fairly obvious indication. Just how many Jordin’s Laws can we have before we get back to calling them “Sensible Limitations on Repeat Offenders Act of 2010"  (SLO-ROAd!) and such? Just after we’ve regained our collective sanity, I’d say.