Live from Austin!

I skipped the presidential debate, but I think I might watch the VP debate. If Caribou Barbie really is as bad as rumors say, there could be lulz.

"The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers." — Ron Paul.

"The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries. [...] The U.S. Constitution established a Republic rooted in Biblical law, administered by representatives who are Constitutionally elected by the citizens." — "Constitution" Party platform.

During the 1990s, UK TV series Spitting Image included a song "Thank You Tory Voters", listing disasters caused by the Conservative government. One memorable line was "Voting Tory’s like a fart, no-one admits they’ve done it".

This was the point at which opinion pollsters noticed something interesting: Conservatives would routinely lose in every opinion poll, and then win the election. Studies were carried out, and it turned out that a surprisingly large number of people were so embarrassed by their support for the Tories that they would routinely tell opinion pollsters one thing, and then vote differently in the privacy of the voting booth.

People are starting to ask whether something similar might be happening in the US Democratic voter base. Here, it’s known as The Bradley Effect. And it’s real:

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.

[...]

Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

Emphasis mine.

So a third of Democratic voters are racists. Imagine what the statistics for Republicans must look like.

The survey team also used Implicit Association Testing:

The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.

From: Joe Biden
To: Barack Obama
Subject: Changes to your positions on key issues

I’ve been taking a look at your web site. There are some changes you need to make if we’re ever going to win this thing.

• Get rid of as many mentions of science as you can. That stuff scares the right-wing Christians.
• Remove the paragraph about surveillance being conducted under the rule of law. It just looks embarrassing after your FISA vote.
• Get rid of the stuff about providing opportunities for minorities to own TV and radio stations, or you’ll never get an interview on FOX.
• Remove the talk of parental controls and filtering tools. Parents don’t want to be responsible for their children’s upbringing.
• Get rid of the stuff about open government. A live feed of our meetings where we make important decisions? Are you nuts?
• Get rid of the stuff about redefining broadband to be over 200kbps. The telecoms industry doesn’t want to roll out the fiber we paid them for.
• Get rid of the paragraph about community use of the wireless spectrum, or the corporate radio stations will bury you.
• Pull all the stuff about immigration reform. Immigrants can’t vote.
• Remove the stuff about better enforcement of antitrust law.

Thanks in advance for your speedy compliance.

Joe

• Sarah Palin can "just put down the BlackBerry and pick up the breast pump".
• John McCain invented the BlackBerry.

• Sarah Palin describes herself as a pit bull with lipstick.
• John McCain described his wife as plastering on the makeup like a trollop.

• John McCain has always been very concerned about ‘pork barrel’ spending.
• Sarah Palin has always been very concerned about obtaining ‘pork barrel’ funds.

• Sarah Palin tried to sell the Alaskan state government’s jet plane at fire sale prices on eBay.
• John McCain’s jet plane set fire to the USS Forrestal.

• Sarah Palin has a disabled son.
• John McCain collected a disability pension as well as his $165,000 a year senate salary.

• Sarah Palin is the youngest governor of Alaska.
• John McCain is older than Alaska.

I’ve been a bit bemused by the anger over Obama picking Biden. It’s pretty obvious why he was the pick. Obama had been heavily criticized for (a) lack of experience, (b) being a secret Muslim, (c) being a drug user, and (d) shamelessly flip-flopping on the FISA vote.

Biden is (a) one of the longest-serving Democrats, (b) a devout Christian, (c) the guy who brought us the Drug Czar of the War On Drugs, and (d) one of the few Democrats to vote against FISA.

Yes, he voted for the Iraq war, but so did most of the Democrats. And in fairness, he tried to push through a motion saying that war was authorized only if all diplomatic channels failed, but it was shot down.

Of course, now the criticism has smoothly switched from "He has no experience" to "His VP choice has too much insider experience and doesn’t show a commitment to change".

“And I regret some of the recent behavior Russia that has exhibited, and I’ll be glad to talk about that later on including reduction in oil supplies to Czechoslovakia after they agreed with us on a missile defense system, etcetera.” — John McCain, 2008-07-15.

Still, he’s learning to use The Interwebs. Right now if he needs to see a web site or e-mail he has his staff show it to him, because he can’t operate a web browser. Oh well, at least he knows what a telephone is, judging from the photo.

So, we could go from a President who knows how to use a computer but doesn’t read, to one who knows how to read but can’t use a computer.

So, in spite of earlier promises to try and bring down the FISA bill and stop retroactive immunity for telecoms providers who illegally wiretapped Americans, Barack Obama quietly avoided voting in the Senate, as did Hillary Clinton.

In the House, 94 Democrats had a sudden change of heart and voted the measure through.

Why did this happen? Well, it could be something to do with the average of $8,359 per politician that they received in "donations" from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, compared to the reduced contributions seen by those who opposed the measure.

I must be old, I remember when you had to wait until after the election to see politicians abandon all their promises. So yeah, like many people I no longer expect much from Barack Obama. What will be the next position he abandons–opposition to torture?

A study of the brains of political partisans shed some scientific light on the obvious, and will be worth remembering in this upcoming year:

The Democrats and Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate threatening information about their own candidate. During the task, the subjects underwent fMRI to see what parts of their brain were active. What the researchers found was striking.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory who led the study.

Yeah, no shit.

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions — essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted — not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward — similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," says Westen. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

In other words, Washington was right.

Live near Minneapolis? Bush supporter? The FBI are looking for people to infiltrate sinister vegan potluck gatherings and report on any terrorist planning activities that happen there, so they can be ready for the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Remember, loyal Americans eat steak!