kottke.org posts about Politics
Senator Obama doesn’t need to be paged…he’s already read Michael Pollan’s piece on US food policy.
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
I wonder if McCain had a chance to read it. (thx, tim & jeremy)
SNL’s Fred Armisen shows off his interactive touchscreen skills on some political maps of the US.
Check out Michigan…I can make it bounce.
Nice commentary on TV news anchor busywork. See also Anderson Cooper’s magic pie chart. (And sorry, Hulu = US viewers only.)
Update: For non-US viewers, here’s an alternative link that includes the clip in question and a bunch of other stuff. And please don’t yell at me for using Hulu…it’s often the only alternative and it’s relatively easy to watch outside of the US. (thx, nebel)
Michael Pollan, who I have spoken of previously, wrote an open letter in a recent issue of the NY Times magazine to the whoever prevails in the November presidential election. Pollan is concerned with contemporary American food policy.
There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.
This is a really long piece but essential, important reading dripping with great stuff. If you don’t have time to read it, Michael Ruhlman summed up Pollan’s main points in a more bite-sized form. An even more abridged version of Pollan’s recent food advice would be:
For people: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
For the United States: “We need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.”
The more I read of Pollan’s writing, the more I wish he were the Secretary of Agriculture or the head of the USDA or something. Paging Mr. Obama…
Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman suggests that just asking people whether they are going to vote is a good way to get them to actually vote.
Those effects would be small at the margin, but there are those effects that are small at the margin that can change election results. You call and ask people ahead of time, “Will you vote?” That’s all. “Do you intend to vote?” That increases voting participation substantially, and you can measure it. It’s a completely trivial manipulation, but saying ‘Yes’ to a stranger, “I will vote”…
(via marginal revolution)
Update: Or perhaps not. This paper by Dustin Cho finds that there’s no “statistically significant” correlation between intending to or being asked if you’re going to vote and actually voting. (thx, max)
Philip Kromer took the newspaper endorsement data from the Editor and Publisher page I linked to this morning and mapped the results. The states are colored according to FiveThirtyEight’s current projections and those newspapers with larger circulations have larger circles. From Kromer’s blog post:
This seems to speak of why so many on the right feel there’s a MSM bias - 50% of the country is urban, 50% rural, but newspapers are located exclusively in urban areas. So, surprisingly, the major right-leaning papers are all located in parts of the country we consider highly leftish. The urban areas that are the largest are thus both the most liberal and the most likely to have a sizeable conservative target audience.
In a huge shocker, the NY Times has endorsed Barack Obama for President. They also have an interactive feature that shows the newspaper’s past endorsements, from Lincoln in 1860 to the last Republican candidate endorsed, Dwight Eisenhower in 1956.
According to Editor and Publisher, Obama is leading McCain in newspaper endorsements by more than 2-to-1, including most of the major papers. Obama: LA Times, NY Times, Sacramento Bee, SF Chronicle, SJ Mercury, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Boston Globe, NY Daily News, The Houston Chronicle. McCain: San Diego Union-Tribune, Tampa Tribune, Boston Herald, New York Post, Dallas Morning News, The Detroit News.
Matt Haughey lists a bunch of ways that political candidates can get his nerdy vote.
I’ve been thinking lately about a dream candidate for my nerd habits, my nerdy business, and the way I live my nerdy life. Regardless of party affiliation, if you’re running for an office from as small as city council all the way up to president, if you hit on any/all of these things, you just might get my vote.
Universal healthcare, universal broadband, and a renewed commitment to science are on his list…anything missing?
A fantastic series of photos from Time photographer Callie Shell of Barack Obama. Shell has been photographing Obama since 2004.
Obama listens from a back stairwell as he is introduced in Muscatine, Iowa. It was his second or third speech of the day. Unlike many of the politicians I have photographed in the past, I find it is easy to get a photograph of Obama alone. He lets his staff do their jobs and not fuss over him.
I loved that he cleaned up after himself before leaving an ice cream shop in Wapello, Iowa. He didn’t have to. The event was over and the press had left. He is used to taking care of things himself and I think this is one of the qualities that makes Obama different from so many other political candidates I’ve encountered.
Two staffers had just passed this site and done two pull-ups. Not to be outdone, Obama did three with ease, dropped and walked out to make a speech.
It’s always the little things.
For some kids in the less diverse areas of the country, any black stranger is Obama.
I’ve heard from 2 different friends with very young children being raised in, ahem, more homogeneous areas of the country who have taken to calling any black strangers Obama.
I love this list of conditions that would have to be true if Obama really is a radical Marxist terrorist.
…and/or that those of his friends/colleagues/co-conspirators to whom he did reveal his true agenda, (William Ayers, et al) have also maintained absolute perfect silence/mendacity on the topic, forever, as no one who actually knows Obama has ever said, “You know, once he’s got a couple of drinks in him, he starts going on about Che and finishing the Revolution;”
According to the latest polls, we might be close to finding out what happens When Obama Wins…
Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama for President.
To summarize what little I learned from all this: A candidate may well change his or her position on, say, universal health care or Bosnia. But he or she cannot change the fact — if it happens to be a fact — that he or she is a pathological liar, or a dimwit, or a proud ignoramus. And even in the short run, this must and will tell.
To hammer home his point, Hitchens compares McCain to Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot’s running mate in 1992. Oh yes, he went there.
From The Living Room Candidate, a site which houses presidential campaign commercials from 1952-present, comes a 1960 commercial for John F. Kennedy. How the ad positions Kennedy reminds me of the delicate fusion that Barack Obama is attempting with his relative newness to politics and readiness for the job.
Do you want a man for President who’s seasoned through and through but not so doggoned seasoned that he won’t try something new? A man who’s old enough to know and young enough to do…
What a great ad…I wish they still made ‘em like this. You may remember seeing this on Mad Men.
Illustrator Bob Staake explains the process behind his cover on this week’s politically themed New Yorker, including rejected alternatives and a video progression of the finished design. Staake still uses a copy of Photoshop 3.0 on MacOS 7 to do his illustrations. That was a great version of Photoshop…I remember not wanting to switch myself. (via df)
Update: Staake uses OS X with MacOS 9 running in the background:
Let me clear up today’s rumor: I do NOT work in OS 7. I use OSX and run classic (9.0) in the background. Photoshop 3.0? Yes, STILL use that.
The New Yorker devotes the entire Talk of the Town section in their latest issue to their endorsement for President. As you might guess, Obama gets the endorsement and John McCain receives no quarter from the editors. The key part of the article concerns the candidates’ possible appointments to the Supreme Court and their consequences. A more conservative court scares the shit out of me.
I’ll be liveblogging the substantive parts of the Vice Presidential candidate debate. Updates below.
Update @ 10:44pm: Ok, the debate is over.
Deborah Solomon recently interviewed Charles Murray for the NY Times. Murray is the author of the recent book, Real Education, which argues that 80% of all college students should not be pursuing a bachelor’s degree.
Even though the interview is pretty short, Solomon shows how Murray’s scientific views don’t jibe with his political views, namely that you don’t need smart, able people running the country.
What do you make of the fact that John McCain was ranked 894 in a class of 899 when he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy? I like to think that the reason he ranked so low is that he was out drinking beer, as opposed to just unable to learn stuff.
What do you think of Sarah Palin? I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love.
She attended five colleges in six years. So what?
Why is the McCain clan so eager to advertise its anti-intellectualism? The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government. Probably the smartest president we’ve had in terms of I.Q. in the last 50 years was Jimmy Carter, and I think he is the worst president of the last 50 years.
The cognitive dissonance inside Murray’s head must be deafening.
A very interesting graph of the estimated ideological positions of US voters, senators, and representatives shows that members of Congress are much more liberal and conservative than are US voters, who fall somewhere in the middle. (via 3qd)
Steven Heller asked a bunch of designers and illustrators to re-imagine the lapel pin for Barack Obama.
Since Mr. Obama promotes himself as the candidate of change, maybe he should start wearing a different kind of lapel pin that signals his patriotism as well as other values he wants to communicate.
One fellow suggests ripping his lapels off and thereby skirting the whole pin issue. (via design observer)
Video of the 2008 Democratic primary in 8 minutes.
Awesome recap…and mostly new to me because I didn’t pay much attention to all the weighty issues that were bandied about during the whole thing. (via jakob)
We’re one step closer to finding out what happens when Obama wins.
On the occasion of the release of his 2000 Rolling Stone essay on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign in unabridged and expanded book form, David Foster Wallace gives a short interview to the WSJ.
McCain himself has obviously changed [since the 2000 campaign]; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now — for me, at least. It’s all understandable, of course — he’s the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing. As part of the essay talks about, there’s an enormous difference between running an insurgent Hail-Mary-type longshot campaign and being a viable candidate (it was right around New Hampshire in 2000 that McCain began to change from the former to the latter), and there are some deep, really rather troubling questions about whether serious honor and candor and principle remain possible for someone who wants to really maybe win.
(thx, bill)
A list of all the US presidential election logos from 1960-2008. That’s a whole lot of red and blue. I particularly liked 1988’s Dick “Chrysler” Gephardt and Paul Simon’s Top Gun homage. (via quips)
How this whole When Obama wins thing got started: some Adaptive Path folk musing about state name changes if Obama won:
Dan was twittering something about Alabama, but wrote “Alambama”. He joked that when Barack Obama wins the election, certain states will probably be renamed - Alobama, Califobama, Nevama, Massabama, New Yobama. Of course, I thought that was hilarious and started thinking about other things that would change once Obama wins. So, a few of us started twittering silly little things, thinking of it as an inside joke.
Overnight, a few people caught on giving it a life of its own.
And if you’re so inclined, you could Digg When Obama wins and help melt my web server.
Update: It’s on Reddit as well.
I’ll admit I don’t watch politicians speak that often, particularly in public. So maybe I’m being a little naive here, but San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is nothing short of a magician up on the stage. He talked for 20 straight minutes (his would-be interviewer could only get in 2-3 questions during that time and Newsom pretty much ignored them and talked about whatever he pleased) and it felt both like 5 minutes and exhausting at the same time. By the time he’d finished what I would term a sermon, I wanted to sign up for whatever he was selling at a price no lower than my heart and soul. I haven’t non-sexually crushed this hard on a speaker since Robert Wright.
Ok, two particularly interesting things that broke my gaze long enough for me to scribble them down in my notebook.
1. Newsom talked about building filling stations for electric cars that relied on exchanging batteries instead of plugging in and waiting for your car to charge. You don’t need to own your particular battery.
2. In SF, he’s hoping to exchange the payroll tax for a carbon tax. In his words, tax a bad thing (carbon use) instead of taxing a good thing (jobs). That way, the incentives are in the right place…people aren’t penalized for working but are penalized for using excessive amounts of carbon.
Update: Oh, don’t get me wrong, I have no idea if Newsom was telling the truth or what…it’s just that it all sounded so good coming out of his mouth. Even when it sounded like bullshit I wanted to believe him. I felt so dirty and manipulated afterwards, but still wanted to believe. Like I said, love…what’s truth got to do with it?
P.J O’Rourke:
Politics won’t allow for the truth.
(via mr)
Honestly I was getting a little burned out on Errol Morris. I’ve been reading his Times blog, reading and listening to interviews with him about Standard Operating Procedure, and went to see him at the Apple Store last night. (I was most intrigued by his observation that photographs both reveal and conceal at the same time.) But this (relatively) short interview with him on the AV Club site is worth reading and got me unburned out. One of the many choice quotes:
I wish they’d just get it over with and make [Iraq] the 51st state, because I think it’s the perfect red state: religious fundamentalists, lots of weaponry. How could you go wrong? We’re already spending a significant fraction of our gross national product on the infrastructure; such as it is, on Iraq. Make it the 51st state and get it over with.
The interviewer, Scott Tobias, makes an interesting observation toward the end.
It seems like there’s been plenty of instances in which big guys [i.e. Bush, Cheney, etc.] could have and should have been held accountable. Yet it’s not as if they’ve slipped a noose. It’s as if they deny that there’s even a noose to be slipped.
And Morris replies:
That’s what’s so bizarre. You know, there are smoking guns everywhere, and people are being constantly hit over the head with smoking guns, and people simply don’t act on them.
For me, this is the central mystery of the Bush administration. There has been demonstrable legal wrongdoing on the part of this administration and through some magical process, they’ve charmed the country and managed to sidestep not only legal action (including impeachment) but even the threat of legal action and — this is the best part — get fucking reelected in the process. With Bush’s disapproval rating at an all-time high (for any President since Gallup began polling), it’s not like people aren’t aware and the 2006 elections clearly show the country’s disapproval with Bush et al. Maddening and fascinating at the same time.
Truckliness is next to Godliness.
Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville, said he had a set [of Truck Nutz] on one of his vehicles, which he described as “all pimped out.” They are no more than “an expression of truckliness,” he said, although he’d acceded to his wife’s request to take them off.
“I find it shocking we’d tell people with metallic testicles on their bumpers that this is a violation,” said Sen. Steve Geller, D-Hallandale. “There’s got to be better things for us to spend time debating.”
(via clusterflock)
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