It’s The Structure, Supid

Robin Givhan mounts a defense of paying disproportionate attention to the outfits of political women:

It is not sexist to have noticed that Sen. Hillary Clinton delivered her convention speech dressed in head-to-toe mango. Only an obstinately unaware person would have ignored this question: Senator, why are you dressed like a tropical fruit? One assumes it was to ensure an eye-catching photo for the history books and to underscore her “sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits” legacy.

There’s some real truth to that and, obviously, if John Kerry had shown up on stage in an orange suit his fashion choices would hardly have been ignored. But to observe that is to overlook the point that, of course, Kerry wouldn’t show up on stage in an orange suit or a red one or a green one or anything other than the standard conservative (in a fashion sense) male “I’m a serious and important person” uniform. A woman in politics could choose to dress consistently in the same kind of drab colors that her male colleagues choose, but that would be noteworthy in its own right. And if she chooses not to do so, then her bold colors become noteworthy. What’s sexist here isn’t noticing a bright orange suit, but the set of differing conventions and expectations about what male and female politicians should do — conventions that all-but-ensure a higher overall level of scrutiny will be given to women’s wardrobes.

Spelling Reform

Very funny video (via Alex Tabarrok) about the case for rationalizing the spelling of the English language. Obviously, readers of the blog will know that I’m a bit spelling challenged. But I say: It’s not my fault, nobody could spell this crazy language correctly!

Beyond myself personally, I’ve heard it said that the extremely high degree of regularity in Finnish spelling helps contribute to that country’s very high literacy rate. I’m obviously not in a position to assess that claim, but it is unquestionably true that English is harder to learn to spell than are many other languages (certainly harder than French or Spanish, the other two languages I have some familiarity with) and that presumably has some impact on the education system’s ability to teach kids to read and write. It strikes me as a subject that’s probably worth some inquiry.

Centrists for SUPERTRAINs

Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute (the DLC’s think tank) is a fellow train enthusiast and has put together an excellent policy report making the case for substantial investment aimed at creating several new high-speed rail corridors in those parts of the country where we have cities spaced the appropriate distance apart. California, where the state is moving ahead with HSR plans would seem to be the most-promising candidate at the moment though there are several other good options.

To anticipate the usual objections briefly: Yes it’s true that high-quality passenger rail networks in Europe are dependent on public subsidies. But driving and flying also depend for their viability on publicly subsidized infrastructure. What’s more there’s nothing wrong with that useful infrastructure projects ought to be subsidized. The question isn’t whether to subsidize things, it’s what to subsidize. And across a certain range of distances, HSR is speedier than flying. And because train travel is more pleasant and rail stations tend to be more centrally located than airports, trains are a better option even for trips where they’re slightly slower. If we had an appropriate rail network, not only could HSR-appropriate trips be accomplished more effectively (and in a more environmentally sound way) but it would allow our air travel network to focus its resources more tightly on the kind of trips for which flying really is the most appropriate solution.

You Don’t Need a Weatherman

Got back to DC just in time to get seriously Hanna’d during a perhaps misguided effort to leave the house:

While contemplating the storm, and the additional storms down the road, ponder Joe Romm’s post at Climate Progress about how, yes, global warming is making storms fiercer and will continue to do so unless we do something.

Best User Guide Ever

Google hasn’t released a Mac version of Chrome yet so I haven’t gotten a chance to try it yet, but via James Fallows I see they’ve definitely come up with the best user guide I’ve ever seen for a program.

A Job Growth Comparison

Here’s a little chart that’s kicking around the CAPosphere:

Looks to me like we’ve become a nation of whiners.

Attack of the Russian Fish

The “Alaska is close to Russia” line rears its head once again — but with a twist. Now instead of just being told that Alaska is near Russia, Sarah Palin is said to have dealt with Russia on “permitting issues and with fishing issues dealing with the sea fishing industry there in Alaska.”

I’m sure that was a tense negotiation. I’m not really sure I understand why the GOP is out there with these lame talking points. On the one hand, it’s really quite normal for people with no foreign policy experience to become president — Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, etc. — and on the other hand Palin doesn’t seem to have any noteworthy experience or profile on domestic issues either so it’s hardly as if she’s one fishing permit deal away from being a seasoned veteran of the political scene.

Change Pakistanis Can’t Believe In

Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, known as “Mr Ten Percent” for his penchant for demanding bribes, is in as next prime minister of Pakistan. It seems that he won’t be coming in with much of a mandate:

A survey by Gallup Pakistan showed a lack of enthusiasm for the presidential candidates, with 44 percent of the respondents saying that they did not approve of any of the candidates.

Mr. Zardari received a 26 percent approval rating in the poll, compared with 18 percent for Mr. Siddiqui, the candidate of the Pakistan Muslim League-N.

The Times article says that as President Zardari “will have great powers, including the ability to dissolve Parliament and name the head of the Pakistani Army.” I’ve been told, however, by knowledgeable groups that it’s pretty doubtful the civilian president really could effectively boss the security services into doing anything they don’t want to do. And the fact that he won’t be coming in with any kind of overwhelming popularity seems to support the notion that in practice the Army will have a lot of leeway to do what it wants.

Friday Airport Blogging

Oprah has good taste:

In other Tolstoy news, I feel like Hadji Murad should be talked about more. Kind of a precursor to the Anbar Awekening / SOI strategy we’re currently employing in Iraq.

The Takeover

Looks like the government is taking Fannie and Freddie into receivorship: “The executives were told that, under the plan, they and their boards would be replaced, shareholders would be virtually wiped out, but the companies would be able to continue functioning with the government generally standing behind their debt, people briefed on the discussions said.”

Not sure I understand the logical behind “virtually” wiping out the shareholders as opposed to totally wiping them out. As per this Economist article the sensible thing seems to me to be to nationalize the GSEs entirely and then eventually have them broken up into bits that are subsequently privatized.

Slicin’ Up Eyeballs

Having a frustrating air travel situation (managed, after some difficulty, to get myself booked on a red eye back to DC that I’m pretty sure is going to wind up getting canceled) but sitting around at the gate I stumbled across the “Debaser” video for the first time and it kinda cheered me up:

Meanwhile, tribute albums are lame, but I think Where Is My Mind? A Tribute to the Pixies is actually quite good. Still, a couple of weeks ago I was talking to someone who referred to “Alec Eiffel” as a Get-Up Kids song and there’s really no excuse for that.

“Uppity” Westmoreland

Rep. Lynee Westmoreland (R-GA) thinks Barack Obama is “uppity.” And it seems he also doesn’t think “uppity” is a racist term:

I’ve never heard that term used in a racially derogatory sense. It is important to note that the dictionary definition of ‘uppity’ is ‘affecting an air of inflated self-esteem —- snobbish.’ That’s what we meant by uppity when we used it in the mill village where I grew up.

In other news, Rep. Westmoreland thinks you are very, very stupid.

The Talk of the Town

Marc Ambinder reports:

Folks at my company are super excited about our newest product — a 300-sample-per-night daily tracking poll sponsored by the folks at Diageo. Last night’s track has Obama up six, 46 to 40 among registered voters.

In the past I’ve noted that the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll’s information is presented in a way that’s likely to generate buzz via misleading narratives — statistical noise looks meaningful the way they present it. But Hotline/Diageo are doing one better by using a much smaller sample, 300 people per day instead of 1000 per day. One bonus of the smaller sample is that it’ll be cheaper. And, ironically, another bonus of the smaller sample is that it’ll produce worse data — more random noise — that, in turn, will probably help gin up more interest in the poll.

In Defense of Country First

Jim Henley doesn’t like McCain’s slogan:

Oh by the way: “Country First” is a fascist idea. There ought to be a fairly large number of people, things and groups that are more important to you than your “country.”

In his defense, whether or not there ought to be a bunch of things that are more important to me than my country, I think it makes a lot of sense for me to want a President who’ll put country first. You wouldn’t want top government officials to, for example, still from the public treasury and give the money to their kids. Or hand out undeserved contracts to ner-do-well siblings.

Humphrey on Civil Rights

Just as a bit of convention history, here’s a recording of Hubert Humphrey speaking out, bravely, in favor of the Democrats adopting a Civil Rights plank to their platform back in the 1940s when conventions mattered.

What the GOP Cares About

My colleagues at ThinkProgress have done a nifty analysis of which words were used heavily and which rarely at the GOP Conveniton. We’ve got 14 POWs, 11 Mavericks, 5 hockey moms, 4 nuclear weapons, and 1 Osama bin Laden.

Unemployment Up

I said when the quarter two GDP numbers came in showing decent growth that this seemed inconsistent with what we’ve seen from the labor market data. And today comes another data point that certainly looks more like recession than like 3.3 percent growth, as unemployment ticked up to 6.1 percent on the eighth consecutive month of job losses. The country has seem substantially higher unemployment numbers in the past, but overall the rate of job creation during the Bush-era expansion was ridiculously slow and has turned south well before the employment-population ration ever re-achieved its 1990s-era peaks.

Barracuda

I only saw this part on closed caption, but apparently when Sarah Palin came out at the end of John McCain’s speech last night, they played Heart’s “Barracuda” which has recently been re-made famous through inclusion in Guitar Hero:

It’s her nickname, to be sure, but the lyrics seem a bit off-message:

All that night and all the next
Swam without looking back
Made for the western pools - silly fools!

If the real thing don’t do the trick
No, you better make up something quick
You gonna burn burn burn burn it to the wick
Ooooooohhhh, barra barracuda.

Basically, I think we need more Abba.

Energy Independence Bites Back

Conservatives have been talking nonsense about energy policy for weeks and John McCain seems ever-more-invested in it. But when you hear something dumb like this there’s something that should be kept in mind:

Sen. Obama thinks we can achieve energy independence without more drilling and without more nuclear power, but Americans know better than that. We must use all resources and develop all technologies necessary to rescue our economy from the damage caused by rising oil prices and to restore the health of our planet.

What you’re hearing here is, in part, a bit of political opportunism from progressives coming back to blow up in our faces. Energy independence was simply never the real issue. Canada has many fewer people in it than the United States has, but it produces more hydropower than we do:

Under the circumstances, there’s no reason we should aspire to become “independent” of Canadian electricity. And, indeed, since many parts of the United States are quite a bit closer to Canada than they are to Texas or Alaska there’s no reason to think that energy autarky would or could ever be an efficient way to allocate resources. There’s nothing wrong with importing clean energy when doing so is economically reasonable, and there’s nothing good about domestic production of dirty energy. But “energy independence” and the insidious “foreign oil” polled better than did more serious talking points so the rhetoric of energy autarky got a ton of validation. And then along comes the folks who want to say we need to “drill here, drill now” and it’s probably true that insofar as you think, wrongly, that the nationality of our energy resources is the main issue that domestic exploration is part of the solution.

McCain Video

You can’t help but admire the way John McCain refuses to exploit his wartime service for political gain.

Hockey

Okay, I flipped from football — America’s favorite sport — over to the politics thing and once again I’m hearing about all-American values and, um, hockey. We understand that real Americans don’t play, watch, or think about hockey ever, right? Baseball, football, basketball, NASCAR we’ve got a lot of popular sports here in the United States. And then there’s this odd Russo-Canadian game that can’t even get on ESPN.

Back to football for me.

I’m Ready

You know what’s more fun than political conventions? Football!

Staying Regular

You should definitely read this post from Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s a reminder that part of what drives the conservative meta-narrative about “authentic” working class conservatives versus liberal elites is the belief that black people — a bit over ten percent of the population, and usually closer to twenty percent of the voting base for a Democratic presidential candidate — just basically don’t exist. They’re invisible people. Likewise, Hispanics. And, indeed, white people don’t count either if they’re too poor:

Some of the numbers: Non-college whites in our latest poll split 50-41 percent for McCain over Obama. Advantage McCain. But whites with annual household incomes under $50,000 split by 49-40 percent for Obama. Advantage Obama.

But somehow this is all “inauthentic.” The only way to be a “regular person” is to (a) have white skin, (b) not descend from Spanish-speaking people, (c) not go to college, (d) not be poor, and (e) avoid living in a big city. Nevermind that a large majority of the American public falls into one of the Five Forbidden Categories of Irregularity.

WaPosted

Hey! Look what I wrote.

Devils

You know who’s in a really evil line of work? The community organizers trying to help struggling neighborhoods guys who tell airlines it makes sense to overbook flights causing inconvenience for all.